


Idle Lines

by lollki



Category: The Pacific (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - they both served but not together, IT'S GAY, M/M, Pining & Yearning, Sharing a Bed, Slow Burn, Yearning & Pining, being in love without realizing that you are, near-obsessiveness, problematic alcohol use, ranch au, rated T now for some crude language, rating will go up as the story progresses
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-29
Updated: 2020-06-21
Packaged: 2020-09-29 21:47:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 32,092
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20443052
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lollki/pseuds/lollki
Summary: "Eugene's not familiar with the exact shape or form in which the war sticks to Shelton, but judging from his own nightmares and the way his instincts kick in before his reason sometimes, he has a pretty solid idea of how it might look. After a solemn pause, a respectful space to acknowledge Shelton's words, Eugene says:„It's messed up how we still gotta see all that, even though we made it through.“Eugene Sledge finds himself lost after his return from the war, whiling away at novels, spending his days in a mindless absence that keeps him numb and dissatisfied. When a young man arrives at the doorsteps to his father's ranch, something in Eugene begins to change.





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To be completely honest, I'm not qualified to be posting this right now. I don't like my writing and I think it's lame but I know it didn't used to be so I'm in this moment of just dishing it out without giving it much thought. Think it might be therapeutic? It's not good advertisement, I'm aware, but it's not like I'm hoping to earn a living here, so.
> 
> Shamelessly based on that one tumblr post.

The sun sets low in Alabama that night and Eugene feels like he'll remember it for a long time to come. He glances out the window in an almost wistful manner, his eyes sweeping across the acres of plane in a rich golden yellow, painted orange in streaks. He finds himself reminiscing about how he's been feeling awfully quiet that day, almost like a calm before the storm, and mindlessly bored, after finishing his novel so that he has to content himself with watching the clouds roll by, in that pink-purple float. The grandfather clock by the table is ticking in a way that's steady like water-torture and it unnerves him but when he sees something odd on the horizon, he stops hearing it altogether. At first it's but a speck in the scenery, like watching an ant move across the forest ground, slowly, slowly, drawing no closer to its destination, seemingly. It's just that; something that happens to be moving, and it has no discernible shape so that Eugene half hopes it might just be a stray, something that's found its way out there by chance. As it grows bigger, there seems more purpose to it; The shape is moving idly, a good half-mile away and it looks distinctly like it's heading their way, moving by foot instead of on a horse and pulling to the right on a soft limp. Pulling his eyes away from the scene, Eugene glances over to his father and tries to search for some sort of recognition, an expected guest, perhaps, but finds that he's looking just as puzzled as Eugene himself at the late arrival. As the figure draws nearer, stalking down the gravel path, past the gates to the farm, Eugene makes out the face of a young man, somewhere around his own age. He squints perplexedly but retreats into the house when he hears a solid knock on the door; out of eyesight but still close enough to hear the talk.

He braces himself, unconsciously, like he's expecting to have to run as the door opens and he can't see much but the way the man's hands are tucked shyly into his pockets gives away that he's not a threat. He hears a voice, weary and gravelly low that he doesn't recognize, an accent that he recognizes to not be from around here.  
  


„Sorry to bother y'all this late, sir, but I've been wandering my a-“ He pauses „I've been wandering all day in search of a place to work'n rest my head but come up empty so far.“ The tone of him sounds exactly like what he describes and Eugene empathizes, wonders for a moment how hard it must be to walk all the way from town to their ranch, in the humid heat, no less.  
  
„I can't do much but I'm pretty good with my hands and I seen some horses out here, so I thought I'd ask.“

  
„What's your name, son?“  
He introduces himself and while Eugene knows for a fact they weren't in need of workers at the moment, he can tell from the gentle tone of his voice that his father's starting to take pity on the boy. He really does sound like he's been having a rough day, his voice catching in his throat in that weary, bone-tired way, and the way he hurries his words when he says „I really don't need much, sir. Just a bed and food, that's all I'm asking.“  
  
A moment later he hears his own name being called and when he ducks into the hallway to catch a glimpse at their guest, he's met with the most eerie, sea-green eyes he's ever seen. There's something haunted in that expression, too, although he can't immediately place it. Sleepy and wide-awake at the same time, flitting over his face nervously, scanning for a threat.

„This is my son.“, his father introduces before he turns to Eugene.  
„Eugene, why don't you help this young man set up in the quarters back out by the stables. He has an early morning tomorrow.“  
At those last words he gives the younger man a pointed look and taps Eugene on the shoulder to get him going. Eugene can see an expression of utter relief as he stretches his hand out.  
„Nice to meet you.“  
  
Him and Merriell Shelton walk quietly alongside each other, down a beaten dirt path between acres of land and a thin line of trees on each side. He can tell how tired the boy must be, dragging his feet so close to the ground he can hear him scraping the dirt in his wake, looking ahead somewhat absently. As they approach the refurbished barn, the sun has almost completely vanished from the sky and something about being out here, all alone in the dark with this stranger makes him nervous. The absent grasp of his hand to his shoulder reminds him that there's no rifle there and no war either and while it's reassuring, he doesn't feel any less rattled. It takes Eugene back, too, as he experiences it and he gets the distinct hunch that it's not fearing for his safety, like usual, but something else. The calm before the storm.  
  
„So, _Eugene_.“ he hears him start, and feels vaguely alarmed. The click of a lighter, the first drag of a cigarette.  
„You don't get out much, huh? The quiet, bookish type?“  
Eugene doesn't even have the time to come up with something for a reply before he goes on, the white-hot hiss of an inhale falling a few feet behind him.  
„You got a sister, Eugene?“  
At that he stops, confused. Shelton catches up and contemplates him idly.  
„Why would it be important that-“  
„No, _Eugene_-“ and the way that boy drawls out his name and rolls his eyes, acting like he's slow, awakens the start of something so hotly infuriating that quickly spreads from his core to his cheeks.  
„A _sister_. You know, someone who don't live far from here who won't mind coming out here every once in a while. Some company.“  
Completely backtracked by that lewd suggestion, Eugene can't help but spurt the first reply that comes to mind. He's struggling to keep up, taken under by this sudden change of pace.  
„No, I only got a brother so why don't you try your luck with that.“  
It seems to shut him up but when he sees him from the corner of his eyes, the boy has a grin stretched across his face that means nothing short of trouble.  
„This is you.“ Eugene says curtly as they arrive by a flimsy-looking wooden shack. „You got all you need in there, blankets are on the beds, there's running water in the back.“  
„Not sure if that's all I need but-“  
„I'll be in the main house.“  
  
He leaves it at that, hurrying back the way he came in a gait that must look absurd from Shelton's perspective but he's flushed to the tips of his ears with annoyed confusion, so it makes it hard to care about anything other than getting out of his vicinity. He feels the young man's huge, green eyes piercing through the back of his neck before the night wraps darkly around him.  
Generally speaking he's not the type of person to draw impulsive conclusions about others but with this one it's almost surprisingly easy to bristle. There's a prickly hot sting that accompanies better replies to his comment that he's coming up with now, much too late to actually say them and he mulls it over, suddenly so tense that he's surpised by the effect of this sole interaction. As he steps back inside the house, out of that weird limbo, and has his father waiting for him he feels a wave of relief.  
  
„I don't like him.“ Eugene immediately states as he steps through the doorframe and his eyes settle on his father's.  
„I don't like him and I think he's rude.“  
  
„_Eugene_-“ his father half-heartedly starts, like he's expecting a discussion too infantile to even bother with and the amount of exasperation in his voice embarrasses Eugene but he's too stubborn to retract.

  
„How do we even know he's not a robber? Might be a robber, for all we know. Looks like one. Like a criminal of some sort.“  
„Son, you know we have an obligation to help those in need. Surely you'd agree that boy looked stone-tired and I don't want to have anyone sleeping out in some field.“  
Almost like second nature Eugene is wont to disagree although he stands by the same principles. There's little in the world that he appreciates more than his father's patience, something that's been directed toward him too. Especially after coming back home, he realizes that not many parents would put up with his idle pace, his navel-gazing, and he's grateful, he really is, but he wants so desperately to nitpick, he's so close to it, and his father seems to sense that.  
  
„You know what, why don't you show him around the ranch tomorrow? It'll do you some good, get your head out those books.“  
And that's that, the end of this discussion. Eugene knows it's pointless to try and fight back and he finds he doesn't particularly have it in him anymore, even if he tried.

\---

The next morning at the break of dawn, Eugene is almost tired enough to topple over from a stand. His neck aches in that familiar way, his eyes burning like saltwater in a wound and not even the wafting scent of coffee from the kitchen has any discernible effect on him. He's exhausted in that nervous way, exhausted from mulling over the new guy's words in his head, grinding them through like he grinds his teeth – gritty and dully painful. The ranch is quiet, still, save for birdsong and the breezy rustle of the birches out front and he takes a moment to savour that relative peace on the porch, coffee in one hand, pipe in the other. He enjoys helping out with work like this, usually, and there's a satisfaction in physical work he hardly finds anywhere else; not academia, and certainly not the battlefield either, on the other side of the spectrum. It's honest and it hardly ever goes so wrong, that it could make him loose sleep over it. In fact, it's about the only thing these days that makes him sleep soundly.

The prospect of having to spend time with Shelton, however, is a different story altogether.  
  
He thinks he can count the times, that he's felt such an immediate sense of distrust toward someone he hardly knows, on half a hand, yet somehow Shelton managed to make that list longer by one, getting a rise out of him with only one interaction. Eugene's not sure what it is; Banter was second nature during his time with the marine corps and he'd met plenty of shifty people before, but the way that Shelton seems untouchable, evasive like smoke, is what really sets him apart from the rest of them. He's difficult to pinpoint, genuine both in the interactions with his father and the completely different tone he struck with Eugene, and that makes Eugene need to predict and read him stronger by a tenfold.  
Maybe it's that he recognizes some part of himself in that cruel demeanor, that makes him so profoundly ill at ease, but no matter what approach at introspection Eugene takes, he feels that dreadful curl of anxiety regardless.  
  
It sticks with him after he finishes his cup of coffee, as he makes his way down to the out-house, and it gets clingier when he sees Shelton already dressed, sitting on the narrow, creaky old stairs that lead up to the door. He's smoking and by the cigarette butts he's gathered in a pile next to him, he's been smoking for a while. He throws Eugene a lazy salute when he notices him and his smile unfolds slow and easy and equal parts unsettling.  
„G'morning.“, he drawls. „Here to show me a good time?“  
„Here to show you _work_, not that you'd know much about that.“  
He says, petty like he's twelve, and Shelton looks mock-disappointed at that, pulling his best expression of self-pity.  
„_Bad_ time, then.“

They spend half the day in near-silence, working away at hay, at manure, alongside. It stretches out into a long, lazy thing and at points seems like it's never going to end, heat beating down on his neck without mercy. Eugene attempts to cover it best he can but he knows it's going to be sore and red by the end of the day. He envies the resilient tan Shelton sports and grows increasingly frustrated at his own tendency to go from white to red to white, distinctly reminded of the heat in his early days on Guadalcanal and how he'd had to deal with his burning skin on top of the dreadful missions. Eugene keeps their interaction to a minimum and Shelton doesn't seem to mind much, mouth ever-occupied with a dangling cigarette. They sit in the shade of the barn at noon, eating sandwiches, trading a canteen of water back and forth and usher the horses back into the stables at dusk to feed them. Eugene's grown up around them but there's something in the way Shelton handles them that looks like second nature, something intuitive and calm that makes him wonder whether he'd been around them since a young age, too. It's almost difficult not to ask him, but the last thing he wants is to give him an opening to start yapping, so he says nothing.  
  


It's close to midnight when Eugene eventually closes up, flicking off all the lights except for the one little lamp outside the stables that shortly paints Shelton in its plastic yellow glow, before he and his sprite-like presence disappear within the blink of an eye. Eugene is wary at that, despite the relative peace of the day so far. He'd been in luck not to fall victim to his relentless quips and intended to keep it that way until he sees him, stalking off to the other side of the field and ducking under the wire fence. Eugene sighs in exasperation and yells after him before following due to a lack of response.  
„Hey, you can't do that!“, he tries again but Shelton only looks back briefly, flashing him a grin a mile wide. Eugene watches him effortlessly climb one of their neighbour's apple trees, his wiry, nimble body snaking between its branches until he sits, picks an apple up and bites into it with a resounding crunch, looking like a king among his riches.  
„Seems like I _can_ do that.“, he taunts and Eugene follows him but stands before the fence, not daring to cross that line.  
„Come on, Sledge.“ Shelton says and plucks another fruit off the branch before throwing it at him.  
„Live a little.“

Eugene, scrambling to catch the apple in time, feels how those eerie bug-eyes are trained on him relentlessly, his every move inspected.  
„I'm serious!“  
Shelton doesn't seem to mind his words much, stretching his arm over the back of his head as he inspects his apple for worms and rotten parts. He bites again.  
„What.“ he yells, mouth full, without any semblance of manners as he turns his attention back to Eugene. „You're serious?“  
„Yeah! You can't just take other people's stuff!“  
„Last I checked it wasn't a crime to steal bread when you're starving. 'Sides, they're pretty tasty, I'm sure you'd change your mind if you just took a bite.“  
„Well, I'm not gonna do that.“  
„Well, you _should_.“  
With that, Eugene feels the last speck of his resolve to stay calm disappear into thin air.  
„You know what?“, he starts and as soon as the first words leave his mouth, the frustration truly begins to unfold. „You can't just come in here acting all poor and pitiful and go on to pull shit like that! I've been tired of you since you came here and it's only been a night so maybe work on that attitude of yours before telling me how to live my life.“  
  
Shelton immediately matches the tone, spitting back viciously.  
„What, like that farmer's gonna go broke over two apples?“ Even despite the dark, Eugene can tell Shelton's rolling his eyes at him in that genuinely disgruntled, annoyed way of his that's not about mocking at all anymore. All it does is feed the fire.  
  
„It's not your place to just climb up over there like that and you know it. It's fucking rude. It's rude to him and it's rude to _me_.“

Something about that resonates painfully with Shelton.  
„Ah yeah, figures you're one of those guys who think the world owes them. Grown up on daddy's ranch, acting like it's you who worked hard for all you got. Bet you act all high and mighty without having worked a day in your life, huh, boo?“

  
„Don't call me that.“

  
„Well, what you gon' do about it? Seeing as you won't even cross that damn fence. Too far from home?“

Like reliving the nightmares from those many years ago, Eugene feels a tug in his chest that pulls his heart all the way down to his stomach. Lying amidst pieces of his hurt pride and his discarded manners there's a piece of something so dark and poisonous that fights back against that last comment, something that makes him bristle against the statement, so hard he can physically feel himself shrink back against it. His tone is lower when he speaks.  
„I was on Guadalcanal, asshole.“

Out of all the things he could have said, Eugene never would have expected that that's what shuts Shelton up. He'd prepared himself for a fight, something that would mock even the most traumatizing experience of his life but all he does is look a little stunned. The contrast between his usual demeanor and that earnest expression almost makes Eugene laugh, without any real humour in it.  
„What, _you_?“  
Eugene throws his arms in the air like he's loosing all hope, face skywards. He turns back to Shelton. „Yeah. You see anybody else around here?“

„I was on Peleliu.“, Shelton says quietly, like all the air's been absorbed by his shock. Eugene finds the way he shifts into that expression almost cartoonish, large eyes wide with disbelief, but can't find it in him to mock Shelton for it. It's like with that, he _knows_, like there's this long-suffering and painful mutual understanding that's stronger than any momentary tryst. A „_Semper fi_“.

  
Within seconds all the tension dissolves into thin air and Eugene finally finds himself understanding a bit more of what makes Shelton so striking to him, and what makes Eugene so incapable of ignoring the little jabs at his ego that come from him, in turn. It's the familiarity of guys like that, that have always made it hard on him – their complete lack of boundaries, the dark, senseless nihilism, when he was viciously trying to cling onto the last shreds of his dignity in all that. It's behaviour that sprouts from the prospect of death that every marine grows accustomed to; trying to make the best of what little time they have left. Eugene's met a handful of guys like Shelton before and it comes together like one part of a puzzle still to unfold in its entirety but there's that one aspect to him, now, that Eugene feels he understands.  
  
It turns out they both know Burgie and the way Shelton speaks of him blossoms a sense of trust in Eugene, like even if he hadn't met Shelton before, if Burgie trusted him then so could Eugene. It almost feels otherworldly, like he's back on the island in one of those quieter moments, shooting the shit with the guys over a game of cards and some awful hooch. Shelton radiates that half-baked machismo unlike anyone he's ever seen but Eugene doesn't mind it because he can name it now – revels in the open familiarity of it, actually – and while he still won't cross the fence, he eats the apples Shelton throws at him. He's devoured three when Shelton speaks, unexpectedly - a change of gears that startles him back out of the perceived safety.

„You see 'em at night too?“

\---

Despite being the reason for the more relaxed atmosphere thereafter, him and Shelton don't talk about the conversation again. Once acknowledged, there seems to be no need for revisiting that and Eugene is fine with it, although some nights he resolves to bringing Shelton's remark up again. It always happens in the safety of his room, the dark and quiet solitude that engulfs his nightmarish despair and the lack of sleep, the sheer exhaustion from that lack of sleep - but as soon as the next day breaks and Eugene wanders out to the barn in that sober light, he's surpressed all about the cold panic that sneaks up on him so often.

It's easy living for the next few days and by each hour they spend working together, they grow closer. Eugene feels it's something of a dichotomy at first. Shelton is nothing like him, be it physically or mentally. He's small and compact, he's crude, he's brash. Eugene, on the other hand, always considered himself pretty sensitive and soft-spoken, even with that stubborn streak of his. Topping that off with his long, lanky body he thinks he's almost exactly what Shelton is not, the very other end of the spectrum. Shelton's brown, Eugene's pale. Shelton talks continually, Eugene only speaks when he has something to say. Shelton has the kind of childish whimsy about him that people like Eugene often needed when they got too up in their thoughts about something.

The weeks roll by comfortably, one by one, and the stifling heat is starting to drop after its peak in late August. Eugene is glad for that and the relief of a cool breeze when doing manual labour has him in higher spirits for the first time in a while. Shelton, too, has warmed up by this point and their frictions during the first couple of weeks are steadily replaced by comfortable camaraderie. He teases him, still, and Eugene believes there's little that could ever deter Shelton from doing that – wit and a love for fun at the expense of others engrained to his very core.

Eugene's forgotten all about that off-handed comment a few weeks prior, the sad, melancholic tone Shelton was so quick to laugh off until one night.  
  
Judging from the silence in the house, his parents are already fast asleep and he'd last checked the clock around midnight when he's roused by the soft patter of something hitting his window. He mistakes for the start of rain at first, before he glances over toward the window to see a completely clear sky.  
Growing alarmed at that, sickly, the natural instinct to find the sound's source kicks in fiercely but when he looks out onto the lawn his suspense is released. All he can make out is Snafu's distinct shadow moving a few feet beneath him, ducking down to grab a handful of stones.  
„Eugene!“ he calls softly, careful not to wake anyone in the house except for him and he grins when Eugene opens the window and squints his sleep-slow eyes, hair probably sticking up in every which direction.  
„Shelton, what the hell are you doing?“  
„'m bored.“ he says like that's a reason and a half to wake someone up in the middle of the night. „I couldn't sleep and now I'm bored.“  
„Try'n go back to bed, then.“ but as Eugene is about to close the window behind him, Shelton yells „No!“.  
He says it a tinge too quickly, with a streak in his tone that's a little too close to fear for Eugene to be comfortable with. Despite his bewilderment at that and his own sore need to go back to bed, he listens.  
„Bring some drink.“ Shelton says with finality and despite being disgruntled at being told what to do, Eugene obliges.

They silently trek side by side for a while, toward the pond they'd sit at during lunch sometimes and it's not long before Shelton snags the flask Eugene brought from his hand and takes a long swig. He twists his face sourly before handing it back like an offer, cap unscrewed. Eugene takes it and drinks too and it's bitter and stings but combats his tension and warms up his core, so that he can't regret it despite the taste.

  
When they arrive, the moonlight bounces off the even, glass-like surface of the pond miraculously bright and it's mesmerizing to watch the ripples after Shelton throws a stone as far as he can. Eugene sits down with a huff, bare feet dangling some inches above the water from where he's seated on the ledge and takes in the tranquil scene: Shelton sitting cross-legged before the backdrop of the pitch-black of the pines around them, smoking and drinking in the mercury light that plays off him. For a moment Eugene thinks about how silly it was of him to come out here when he has a full day of work tomorrow but then Shelton speaks up.  
„Sorry, 'Gene, I just couldn't go back to sleep.“

Even though he doesn't add anything, Eugene knows what he means by it. He's not familiar with the exact shape or form in which the war sticks to Shelton, but judging from his own nightmares and the way his instincts kick in before his reason sometimes, he has a pretty solid idea of how it might look. After a solemn pause, a respectful space to acknowledge Shelton's words, Eugene says:  
„It's messed up how we still gotta see all that, even though we made it through.“  
Shelton nods quietly and Eugene thinks he's never seen him so sullen, yet finds that expression painfully authentic on him – a face under a mask. He chances a look sideways to see where Shelton is and finds him absent, physically there but somewhere else.  
„It might pass.“ Eugene says and Shelton agrees although they both know it's for the pretense of optimism and little else.  
„It might.“  
  
It's difficult for Eugene to decide where to go in this interaction from here, like it is with many things for him at this time, specifically. He's in a transitory period in his life and he knows that and tries to accept it but at the same time, it's been over two years and he still hasn't moved a step in either direction. It's painfully quiet and painfully idle and sometimes he wishes he'd gone somewhere different, away from the house and the ghost of his very own, previous self. He has no idea what to do and he says as much, admitting in unlikely candor the minutiae of his lazing. He's too guilty to hold it in and he makes the educated guess that with Shelton it's give and take, that if he wanted to know Shelton, he'd have to let himself be known first.  
  
„You know, I haven't done a thing since I came back.“ He starts and Shelton listens, head tilted in a funny way, looking down-ahead despite his interest.  
„I was gonna go to school and I was sure I'd be back in time to do it - before I enlisted - but now all I do is read and look out the window like I'm waiting on something to come my way.“  
  
There's a non-commital hum coming from Shelton's direction, and a murmur. „You can still do that.“ He says „Go to school, I mean.“  
  
„Yeah, but...“  
Eugene takes a moment to look for the right words, a short little sequence of them to summarize how he's felt for the past years, the ages since he's come back, trying to convey in this the lack of any form of desire, wish, want - how he's been scrambling to keep up despite him dragging his memories behind him like a weight, feeling like he's trudging through quicksand all the while shrinking air-tight into himself from the isolation, both voluntary and in the lack of genuine understanding of the people around him-  
  
„...there's just no point now, I don't think.“  
  
Without moving his head, Eugene exhales, once, as he searches Shelton's face for some kind of reaction, flitting eyes over the soft, silver profile with a worrying dread beginning to droop in him before he can make out what he's thinking, feeling – and allows himself to be relieved.  
Despite Shelton's tendency to make a joke out of each and every of Eugene's shortcomings, he can't find anything other than hopeless, empty understanding on Shelton's expression – a shrug, a raise of his eyebrows – and he's so grateful to the universe for that semblance of understanding when he was expecting to be shamed.  
  


„I been doing pretty much the same, I mean...“ Shelton starts and his hands find one another, twisting his fingers, entangling, untangling.  
„...One day I just started walking out from New Orleans. Just packed my bag and walked and I've been doing that ever since. Not that it got me anywhere good. Keep doing the same shit over and over. Rinse and repeat.“  
He's something out of a painting when he lowers his eyes, lashes sloping down like a stroke of pure, black ink.  
„Better than bein' idle, though.“ He adds and Eugene's heart drops shamefully.  
„Yeah.“  
  
He doesn't have anything to add to that, slowly receding back into his own head and dwelling on what he should or shouldn't do, how he should or shouldn't live. He's come as far as to curse himself once or twice, guilty with the weight he is on his parent's shoulders, his father's conscience for letting him go, before Shelton laughs, suddenly. It's raspy and tired but so genuine that it makes Eugene perk his ears. Something about it warms him, profoundly - the acceptance and the lightness that comes with it.  
  
„You know what they used to call me there? Some of them guys didn't even know my name, 's how far it went.“

Eugene shakes his head and notices that strangely, he's smiling.  
„Snafu.“  
„Seriously?“  
„Yeah.“  
  
_Situation Normal: All fucked up__._ Eugene's heard it being said once or twice when he hadn't yet known what it meant and later learned the sentiment – the veneer of normalcy in something so abnormal, so repulsive that the only thing to do is have a laugh about it. It's crass but when he looks at Shelton he feels it click into place with no resistance.  
„You know what it means?“, he asks and Eugene can't help the spread of his grin as he nods.  
„Yeah. And it makes perfect sense, too.“  
Shelton tries to be nonchalant when he shrugs but he's clearly flattered by Eugene's words, the name and mad-dog image like a token he brought back with him.  
„I'm kinda jealous.“ Eugene admits and takes the cigarette Shelton offers him when he pulls one out for himself. „I never got a nickname. They just called me by my last name.“  
„Sledge?“  
„Yeah.“  
Without giving it even a second of thought, distracted by trying to light his smoke, Shelton rasps.  
„Sledgehammer.“  
Eugene throws his head back in mock-exasperation, looking skywards, half-groaning, half-laughing. He's delighting both in how tacky it sounds and how prepared Shelton is to come up with it, senses the soft amiability sprouting within him at this light-hearted exchange.

„You're telling me that's how easy it would've been?“  
„It's pretty much right there.“ Shelton picks up a handful of stones to throw them into the pond before he speaks, slowly, muffled by the cigarette between his lips.  
„Damn idiots, all of 'em.“  
  
And as he watches the play of water, the rings of glinting moonlight around each little stone Shelton throws, Eugene drinks to that.  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i need praise at every step, i don't know what to tell you.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "It's as though everything he does builds some sort of suspense. It's so unpredictable that Eugene's given up on trying to predict it altogether and the only thing he knows for certain is the uncertainty of him. He's like life itself, in a way, chaotic, erratic, volatile."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'm shrugging. i didn't wanna wait any longer so i'm uploading now.

That night starts an open line of communication between the two of them, reminding Eugene of the tin can phones Sidney Phillips and he used to span between two rooms. For the first time in too long he drinks coffee in the morning, brushes his teeth right after getting out of bed, heads out to the paddock before noon. The world around him is slowly coloring back into what it used to look like and his appreciation for the smaller things starts to blossom once more, the cool, blue mornings, the smell of hay and clover.

It's less lonely than it was before, for one. He sees Shelton everyday and sometimes they react in similar ways. Neither of them like the dark all that much and both of them flinch at loud, unexpected sounds. Sometimes Eugene will touch his shoulder, absently reaching for the rifle that isn't there and while Shelton notices, he doesn't mention it. Eugene learns that he still wears his dog tags when he's lounging shirtless on one of the hotter days but Eugene, in turn, doesn't mention that either. They tend to the horses which Eugene reckons is funny, occasionally, where he thinks about the timid nature of the animals and how the odd pair of them were a perfect match to them, with their own tendency to scare at nothing, but it keeps him grounded and seems to keep his father happy as well. He's glad for it, Eugene knows, for Shelton coming to their ranch and taking that work off his shoulders. The manual work isn't even the main concern for him, but the fact that Shelton keeps Eugene out the house for long enough that he can soak in some sun, breathe fresh air. While he never says as much, it's apparent in the way he talks to the boy, gratitude shining through under his tone. Eugene could feel dejected about it but the changes in the recent past are making it hard for him to stay mad for too long, understanding now the benefits of social interaction and work his parents have tried to coax him into before, to no avail.

When Shelton's invited to dinner one night, they joke about it amicably and although in the moment it sits ill with Eugene, he's grateful for the fact they're speaking in past terms about it. Not that it would have come out of his own parent's mouth – he had only Shelton's lack of manners to thank for that – but the fact they laughed gave weight to it.  
  


When it comes to his mother, he's still a bit sore. She'd go on about his habits for too long, stretching the line between justified criticism and nagging his ear off about reading too many books and not meeting enough eligible bachelorettes and while he'd try to not give her openings to initiate it, he knows that it boils down to the fact that there's no true understanding coming from her. He doesn't blame her for that, can't, because before he was shipped out, he had no concept of the war either, thinking about it abstract terms; heroism, honor, loyalty. But, maybe for the better, there's still that side to him that wants to rebel against her, if only for nostalgia's sake, and he lets himself be a little mad about it, despite his understanding her lack thereof.

In all honesty, he has no interest in living the type of life others deemed the American Gold Standard. He doesn't go to the dances he's supposed to, doesn't apply for the jobs he should – if anything, he'd go back to school although even that feels like it's not his own wish and more of an afterthought. He knows he'll meet someone when he does and he knows he'll figure it out when he does and that's about as much as he can say to her, understandably not reassuring her in the slightest but maybe buying himself some time. When he strikes a certain tone, he knows she'll let it go, and look for something else to do which makes him sad in two different ways. But he takes what he can, and if that's the only way to get himself some space then so be it.  
  


Thankfully, the conflicts don't occur often enough to genuinely disturb his peace and he's mostly happy with how things are going. There's talk of a new car, a new old car. He doesn't expect much of it because his grandfather's promises were more akin to ideas that he'd forget about but his father is adamant enough to make it happen.

It happens on a Sunday morning where the sun's a little too warm and his skin a little too tight and he tries to turn back around to get a few more hours in after spending last night talking with Shelton over some awful alcoholic concoction, at their usual spot, into the very first hours of morning. He vaguely remembers the stories and anecdotes and the way Shelton will talk even more than usual after some drink and thinks about how it's always so surreal, the serene moonlight, the friend-of-a-friend situation. Maybe it's due to the alcohol that's still whirring away in his system somewhere but he likes to think of it as something fateful but Kafkaesque and ascribes, perhaps, more meaning to it than strictly necessary.

  
  


When he hears the familiar crunch of gravel and an old, rattly engine being turned off, he can't have slept any longer than five consecutive hours and curses those poor choices of his, blames it on Shelton's bad influence on him. He knows he'll hear his name being called within the next five and braces himself for it, groaning regardless when he eventually hears it.

He doesn't notice he's still wearing pajamas and robe until it's too late and he's inappropriately posed in front of the stranger, some friend of his grandfather, with his hair tousled and an imprint of red on his right cheek. He clears his throat and his father takes over, trying to twist it into an amicable „boys will be boys“ situation.

The keys exchange hands once, twice. Feeling about as battered and smudged as the car, Eugene stands in front of it with half a mind to process it's now his. The new old car – He didn't think it'd ever happen because his grandfather lacked about the same amount of initiative as he did, in these regards, and yet miraculously, he's still stood across it right then. The hangover static of his brain has him torn between getting dressed, taking a shower and taking the car out for a spin but his haze is interrupted by a voice that has no right to be this chipper.

„ What's the commotion, Sledgehammer?“

Shelton jogs the last couple of steps to where he's standing and when he sees the car, he whistles, impish.

„ She's gon' need some fixing, don't you think?“

„ Last I saw it was driving just fine, don't know what you're talking about.“

„ Yeah but-“

Shelton stalks over, dragging his fingers over the red varnish of the hood, coming away dusty, before he props the hood open with little invitation from Eugene.

Eugene's too slow to react, anyway, as Shelton keeps talking.

„ Look at this, the wiring's all nasty, battery needs a change. Rusty cylinders. I wouldn't trust the thing to go any further than two miles.“

Cranky and irritable, Eugene can't help but feel mad about Shelton knowing more than him. It's not necessarily because he himself is so well-read and knows for a fact that Shelton isn't but it boils down to this chest-puffing rivalry they've had going on since the first time they met. He wants to prove him wrong, somehow, the loss grating like sand in his veins but when he takes a step closer he realizes that there's no way around Shelton being right. It might have driven the short distance from his grandfather's home to theirs just fine but it sure as hell wasn't going to drive much further than that.

Only problem is that Eugene's never been all that good with repair work, something akin to a black thumb in mechanics spoiling his every attempt at it. It's not that he doesn't understand it, the basic physics behind it, but something about taking things apart and putting them back together evokes a sense of distrust in him, as though his own two hands were too fallible to be considered fit for such a task. He shuffles closer, looking over Shelton's shoulder who's already wrist-deep in wiring and stuffs his hands in his pockets, begrudgingly accepting that the other is winning the round. It's for the better though, because Shelton seems enraptured with the project and he's grinning all teeth when he says:

„ Let's patch her up, hm?“

  
  


Sunday means chit-chat, sweet tea by the porch and only a half-day of work for the two of them, which in turn gives them enough time to be sweaty and greasy-handed by noon, both of them hunched over the thing. Shelton clearly has the upper hand in this endeavor and the way he rips parts out and handles it has Eugene cringing as he watches. The fact that he's smoking perpetually doesn't help and he tries to get Shelton to put it out but is shaken off with a simple „I'm not dropping it.“. To his shame Eugene mostly just stands by, watching what he does and commenting on it, much to Shelton's dismay. He knows the theory behind it but hasn't actually ever fixed a car, which Shelton repeatedly points out when he's getting a little too brisk in his observations. Eugene bickers, Shelton bickers back. It's halfhearted and harmless and none of it really carries any weight which, to Eugene in that moment, feels cathartic. Back on the islands, grown out of his cocoon – no longer demure and easily embarrassed. He wonders how their interactions would have gone, had Eugene met Shelton when he was still fresh-faced and green. There's no doubt that combat changed him and yet, whenever Shelton picked on him, he regained a distinct sense of what he used to be like, before the war. It feels like Shelton would have eaten him alive but then again, Eugene has no idea what Shelton himself was like before the war, only ever having met this specific version of him – rude, crude, mean – but something makes him suspect that Shelton has always been a bit of a hell raiser and that his former self wouldn't have stood a chance against his, banter or otherwise.

During the afternoon, Eugene doesn't say much. He handles the things he knows how to and goes along with most things that Shelton says although it never happens without a show of begrudging acceptance. He gains respect for the other in the same measures he gains humility – slowly coming to understand that what he deems important might just be the consequence of his very sheltered upbringing – and he starts learning more about Shelton, too. He grew up on the Bayou, scheming and hustling more often than not, spending more time in the streets than at home starting from a young age. He tells about his parents but only in the vaguest terms, giving Eugene little idea on how their relationship unfolded and then he jumps from topic to topic, dance halls, girls, how to make five dollars out of one, until he's wiping his hands on the oily rag he kept in his belt-loop.

He's the full picture of a foreman when he closes the hood and rests his hand on the red fender, leveling a look at Eugene that is equal parts smug and proud. He's wiping at the sheen of sweat on his forehead, pulling at the oily, stained wife beater to use it on his face and his jeans are all rugged and dirty but it seems like this state is him _au naturel_ – never happier than when he's covered head to toe in a layer of grime, getting his hands dirty.

„ All done.“ - He sighs proudly, and Eugene smiles, walking around it with Shelton's eyes following him suit.  
  


The engine is far less noisy the next time it starts up, giving a respectable roar but by far not as tinny as before. Shelton looks like he's walking a show-horse he's raised himself; He stands with his arms crossed, leaned against the side of it. Despite his ego, Eugene is thankful for it and pushes at his shoulder to get him to move away.

„What, all that just to pose?“ he quips and Shelton rolls his eyes but he's smiling all the same. He goes, easy, and ducks into the passenger seat as Eugene turns the key in the ignition. It's the type of model that gives its passengers an intimate knowledge of the ground beneath it, bobbing over every pebble, but it _drives_ and it's not long before they're on concrete and Shelton sticks his head out the window, going 40 miles down the road into town.

It's exhilarating to feel the blast of wind against his cheeks, even for Eugene who's only opened his window a gap, and the scenery is fitting, too. The sun sets orange in the rear-view mirror and ahead of him are wheat fields that sway in the low breeze, crisp and golden. It won't be long until nightfall but for now, everything is warm and bright and he savors the moment, subconsciously pulling into a soft smile that's hard to get rid of in it's sheer honesty, a true expression to how he feels in that moment. They're not driving anywhere specific, he knows, and he's distinctly reminded of what Shelton said that night, by the pond.

_ I just started walking and I've been doing that ever since. _

This time, though, he's sure it'll get them somewhere good.

It's time to change drivers about a half hour in. He knows Shelton wants a spin in his project, even if he hasn't said it but it'd be weird not to; He's taken on most of the work himself and the way the engine purrs now relative to what it was before, he should at least get that solid, hands-on reward of his own work. Eugene's so content he could cry with it, caught up in the sunshine and warmth and the friendly intimacy that requires no explaining, no justifying. He thinks briefly of how two truly is company, and remembers that even if his friendship with Shelton was born from necessity, the companionship that grew from it was still his very own doing.

Shelton hops out of the car and changes seats with him and the way he's giddy and funny reminds Eugene distinctly of a mischievous kid. He adjusts the seat, the rearview and hardly even lets Eugene get in before he slams into the pedal and they speed off going from zero to 50.

He's pushing it like he always is. While the sheriff's office is all the way on the other side of town, it's still impossible to tell if a stray patrol car got lost in their corner of the county. Eugene's not afraid per se, not exactly, but there's still something about this reckless abandon that Shelton displays that has him anxiously gripping his seat.

It's as though everything he does builds some sort of suspense. It's so unpredictable that Eugene's given up on trying to predict it altogether and the only thing he knows for certain is the uncertainty of him. He's like life itself, in a way, chaotic, erratic, volatile. When Eugene glances over he thinks, also: beautiful. He's never realized it like that but he knows Shelton makes a handsome young man, his marina eyes, his charcoal curls. Any girl would be lucky to have him, he thinks, and for a reason he can't quite put his finger on it doesn't rouse the slightest sense of jealousy in him. All he can think about that very instance is that he's trapped in a wonderful moment and that he's grateful, Shelton included. And the sight of him is just that additional layer of it, mirroring the way he perceives life that second, in its ephemeral, fleeting beauty, just like he recognizes a boyish, youthful little something in the curve of Shelton's cheek. What a pity it'd be to ever lose that, Eugene muses. Maybe boys, just like girls, are the most beautiful as they're grown, yet lingering with one foot in their youth.

He doesn't realize he's staring until Shelton blinks once, twice, keeping his eyes glued to the road. He's focused on driving and can't have noticed, caught up in tempo and curve, driving like it's second nature. Eugene lets go of him and before he notices it's dark outside and it's all blue and black and headlights.

He can’t help but watch. In that instance he makes it out to be because he wants to copy the charm in case he needs it someday, wants to memorize the nonchalance of Shelton’s movements and make them his own. He knows there’s nothing about him that’s anything like that. Eugene feels like he stumbles over his movements more often than not, motivated by that straight back, long posture. He thinks he was forced into a shape that’s not his own, that there’s something that’ll prevent him from being loose like Shelton is. One hand’s on the steering wheel, the other on the stick. He’s distant, looking straight ahead and there’s nothing there but he’s focused regardless and he looks attractive, appealing, even if he isn’t trying at all. 

Before Eugene knows it, they're back in the driveway, racking about with the uneven ground.

It's over much too soon; they get out, they pull a couple of jokes and then they part ways in spite of their long afternoon together and Eugene can't help but feel like it's cut too short, like he wants to come to the barn with him and talk some more, joke some more. But he doesn't and when Shelton walks his way, Eugene walks his own.

„ Six tomorrow!“ Eugene reminds him, yells after him when Shelton's already the size of his hand and he can only see him wave without reply, nonchalant as always, before he turns back and saunters up to his room so vibrant and lively in his step he feels vaguely unlike himself. He chalks it up to the car, the nice weather and yet, there's a gap between that thought and himself. 

When there’s nothing left but quiet, Eugene feels as though hollowed out and filled back up with helium. He’s itchy, funny and the mood of the evening gets to the very top of his head, spinning about in a dizzying pinwheel of greens and browns and yellows. He knows he's worn out from the day, must be, but he stands up some three times to stuff his pipe, open the window then decide against it. 

Eventually he does fall asleep but it's not without some leftover giddy excitement, that pulls him out of his slumber in bouts.

The enthusiasm carries over into the next day; Eugene's good mood picks up again, right where it left off and there's some part to him that thinks he might finally break now, two years after it all ended, but then, with that high came the fall; a stone-cold drop all the way from his chest to the very pit of his stomach, as he's met with the empty shell of a hut, sees a basket of apples and a note that reads:   
  
„_Out at the moment. Will be back at night to pick up the rest of my stuff – don't wait up._“


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The basket fills steadily, glinting glossy moonlight as the apples nestle against one another, round, yellow-red, red, yellow. He thinks briefly of Eugene’s lips. Red. Runs his hand over the different textures out of which none of them comes close to being the _soft_ that he craves.
> 
> When he’s done, he doesn’t count them, just lets the strays fall from where they’re overflowing as he wanders back the way he came. He knows Eugene will eat them. Wouldn’t dare cross the line, but he knows he’ll eat.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ok it's all getting a little edgier now so i'll include a couple of non-soft things that people might wanna get a warning for  
\- unhealthy drinking habits  
\- unhealthy sexual behaviors  
\- vomiting  
\- physical violence aka fistfight  
\- pretty crude language

Snafu doesn’t go to sleep that night - he sits by the stairs for a long time, single-mindedly gazing into the black void that stretches out in front of him. He watches the light in Eugene's room flicker on and off and he hurts, deeply and unlike himself. Cigarette butts join another in an empty jar, amassing evidence of his dwelling and all he can say for himself, the one thing he chews through and through until it's stale is how utterly and completely _ fucked _he is.

It's his eyes, he tells himself. It's those and how he's still gentle and the fact he's managed to stay gentle during all of the war and beyond – stubborn and a bit snooty but gentle – and the way he looks when he tends to the horses, brown-eyed, doe-eyed just like them, long-lashed and russett and freckled. The motion of Eugene placing his hand softly over a mare's cheek and guiding her head toward his, twists uncomfortably in his stomach, just as he inhales the last drag and finds another cigarette to light. On, off, the lights in the window go again and he's glad he's sitting in the dark because he's not sure Eugene wouldn't come over, grace him with that presence that's heady and agonizing at once.

Snafu can handle an unrequited crush – considers himself quite proficient at that – but the fact that he can't handle an unrequited crush _ again _ , not after the last mess he got himself into: some farmer's boy, remaining nameless now, for his own sake, light-skinned, just like Eugene but with darker hair. Taller, maybe, Snafu doesn't remember, but by far less impactful now, with the distance and the time passed.

He's seen too many boys like Eugene; They have this way about them, this reserved show of something bigger inside them, an interest that they’ll let peek through, but veiled. He recognizes the way he’d looked in the car, the way he watches him too intently sometimes, and the fact he’s getting his hopes up hurts him more than any rejection could. With this, it’s easier to withdraw and disappear - and it’s certainly easier for Eugene, too.

He decides to pick himself up and comes to a conclusion; There’s a basket in his room that he collects before he heads out, slow but determined, and walks all the way across the plane until he finds that tree he’d raided on his first day at the ranch. The first touch to the bark has him remembering Eugene’s red-faced frustration, his annoyance at the pasty, rich kid Snafu thought he was. As he climbs, he mirrors the path he’s traveled before, sure in his foot but much weaker, now, with the weight of his messy affection tied to his ankle. He feels like an idiot for it, he does, but he can’t help but let it trickle out _ somewhere _. 

He follows with his eyes as the fruit strings together in his field of vision, one, two, hopes to find the ripest. “Not that it got me anywhere good.” he repeats sullenly, those dry words from many nights ago, again, can’t unite himself with the irony of them, can’t grasp how the very thing he strives against has once more wormed its way under his skin. 

The basket fills steadily, glinting glossy moonlight as the apples nestle against one another, round, yellow-red, red, yellow. He thinks briefly of Eugene’s lips. Red. Runs his hand over the different textures out of which none of them comes close to being the _ soft _ that he craves.

When he’s done, he doesn’t count them, just lets the strays fall from where they’re overflowing as he wanders back the way he came. He knows Eugene will eat them. Wouldn’t dare cross the line, but he knows he’ll eat.

-

In the early morning, Snafu leaves. He writes a note, finds something to write with, to write on, then writes that note to later place it on top of that basket. Had he any more paper and time, he’s sure he would have gone again, again, again, scratched out every word and started anew but there’s only this one try and it should do, now that he’s made up his mind. He tells him he’ll pick up his stuff. He tells him not to wait up.

Snafu has no business joining in the lives of others. He’s no fool; he knows where he’s off better and where he’s not and that instinct keeps him safe, sane. He knows that at the Sledge’s there’s little to prevent himself from becoming complacent and comfortable and he knows he’ll eventually try at it, dig his thumb softly into the crook of Eugene’s elbow where it’s sensitive and silky, just once but too softly, and have him draw his shoulder away as though burnt. He wants so badly to do it but he can’t allow himself to venture that close, keeping at bay like he’s watching a lion in an open cage. While the temptation is so strong it feels like a siren’s call, the moon to a stupid, stupid moth, he’s still himself enough to know when it’s time to hide.

In the cold, blue morning he leaves the basket by his door, the shine of the ripe fruit against the backdrop of that worn-out wood sticking glossy to the back of his eyelids.

He tells Sledge Sr. he’s needed elsewhere. Tells him he’s headed to town and that he’ll come back later to say goodbye. That he’s sorry. 

The man is too polite not to take it and Snafu knows he certainly finds it odd but there’s little he does about it, _ can _ do about it. The only obstacle he’s met with is that damned car and the memory of Eugene’s soft gaze directed at him it stirs, nothing more than a pipe-dream he wishes was more than that, and off he goes, back to the mansion that cradles sleep-warm Eugene in its crevices, eyes ahead, straight ahead, straight ahead.

-

The day passes him dream-like, some instances so pronounced, and others like the blurry edges of a fun-house mirror, bizarrely twisted and bent. There’s not much to tell, were he telling anyone. He goes to the bank, the post office and then straight to the local bar, no pretense found, orders himself a stiff one. It can’t be much later than noon that he downs the first and the second in a span of fifteen minutes and lets them sit until he’s just as blurry as his fun-house mirror memories. 

He watches as the people roll in and out, one by one until he’s met with a familiar face and fights the urge to duck, to instead turn his head the other way. The barkeep must notice since he frowns, beetle black eyebrows creeping toward each other on his forehead. He chances one look at Snafu, then at the newcomer: a farmer from the very furthest outskirts of the county - then back to Snafu, as he’s trying his best not to draw attention to himself. 

Certainly puzzled he leans over.

“Old friend?” he asks and Snafu snorts and tilts his head down, with the distant objective to hide his face.

“Acquaintance.” he says and when the other’s passed, he pulls his lips into a sharp point. There’s something sour crawling up the back of his throat, something that urges him to hide so he excuses himself to the bathroom a moment later to find one of the stalls and wait it out.

He’s in there for a while, unsure about what to do other than leave the place as quickly as he could, but it’s quiet enough that he gets himself caught when he peeks.

“Shit.”

“Shelton.” the man states flatly, the man he’d tried to avoid.

It’s Guilford, and he curses himself internally because he knows the man’s a drunk and coming here when he’d lied about-

“Thought you was back in Louisiana.”

Snafu stands, uncomfortable with the proximity of him but doesn’t wriggle through the narrow gap he leaves between the stalls and himself, the broad-shouldered, fat body of him. The red of his face alone, the way he chews his square jaw in a way it almost reaches his temples, looks like Snafu’s signal to get out. His hair is shorter, now, matted, greyish blond and there’s nothing welcoming about him as he stands.

“Got caught up.” Snafu replies. It’s difficult trying to straighten out his back, appearing nonchalant, when the other is such a towering presence, looming above him like the blade of a guillotine, ready to snap.

“Why don’t you join me in there-” Guilford nods his head at one of the stalls.

“Have a little chat.”

Snafu snorts. _ Chat _.

“I’m busy.” he says instead, no _ yes _ but no _ no _ either.

“Don’t look all that busy to me.”

There’s a moment of silence that settles a heavy weight in Snafu’s stomach, a stone-cold drop exacerbated by the alcohol that’s making him slow, lax. He tips his chin up, trying to appear taller and thinks briefly about how he could beat him if he played his cards right, were he attempting to physically overpower him. He’d been back from the war for a while now and sure, he’s gotten softer but that kind of thing is muscle memory - shouldn’t be all that hard to punch a man square in the jaw if it came to it.

“Look, what do you want me to do here, I’m not gon’ bother you if you’re not botherin’ me. Let’s just leave it at that.”

“I’m not worried ‘bout you _ bothering _ me.” says Guilford and with the step he’s taking closer Snafu resolves to slip out through the gap he leaves, standing casually but his shoulders squared.

“Yeah? It’s all good then.”

“You still owe Brewer.”

“Then he can come take it up with me. I don’t see how that’s any o’ your business.”

Snafu knows he’s pushing it when he strikes that tone, a moment of fear flitting over his eyes that goes unnoticed to Guilford’s brutish intellect and suddenly like a switch flipped, Guilford laughs. 

“Come on,” he starts, raising his hands in a way that feels like mockery. “What’re you bein’ so defensive for. You know I don’t mean it like that.”

Warily, Snafu observes him from the corner of his eye.

“Let me at least buy you a drink. For old times’ sake.” 

-

Guilford is a volatile and unpredictable man and while Snafu understood himself to be somewhat similar in this regard, his own stormy temper was nothing compared to the volcanic moods the other presented.

Snafu remembers many instances where they were out, playing cards and then he thinks on one instance where he’d won back twice his stake from some poor rookie that he’d wrestled into an “amicable bet”. The elated side of him was often just as hard to endure as his wrath, but Snafu was all by himself, all the way out in some outback corner of Alabama and knew people like Guilford so intimately it must have felt familiar enough to have him sticking around. 

Guilford would later get angry at Snafu for letting him spend all his earnings on booze and Snafu would only laugh at him, cuss his sorry ass out and duck into the next dive only to have him follow suit like a wet dog.

Their relationship got off on the wrong foot, entirely, almost like a dip into some bizarre alternate life that was never supposed to pan out that way. Snafu thinks it’s random and Guilford doesn’t really give a fuck as long as he’s getting his dick sucked. 

It was his son that Snafu had had his eye on but incidentally, they got caught after he’d gotten too attached to that little pinprick of interest in him and made a move. 

Guilford whooped his son’s ass, drunkenly, of course, then when he came knocking at Snafu’s door he was scared shitless but there was nothing to follow.  
He’d sat down, told him, drunkenly, of course, that he didn’t want that life for his son but that Snafu was too far gone, just like himself. What a great fucking way to start a conversation, Snafu thought, and all weary from the whole situation he made a move again, if only to get him to stop talking, from pulling him into that depressive, egocentric spiral of self-loathing any further. Snafu stayed at that farm but didn’t talk to the boy again and instead got himself into all kinds of trouble with Guilford. 

Having sex with the man was an act of spite as much as it was a sort of narcissistic self-indulgence, the same way masturbating in front of a mirror is - but at the very deepest core of it all, he was bored mindless to the point where it made him stupid.

It got worse, later on, and he got the hell out of there before it could get worse than worse, but he has no mind to think about that.

-

They drink, because of fucking course they do, and Guilford’s paying because he’s as shit at flirting as he is at being a family man.

Snafu figures all isn’t lost if he could at least wrangle a drink out of the guy, give himself some semblance of compensation for this very shitty scenario he’s found himself in and when his head is clouded enough Snafu thinks that maybe a lay is what he needs if he wants to rid himself of the sticky, persistent ghost of Eugene.

One sidelong glance and he laughs at the absurdity of the idea; he’s past that, now, no way in hell is he going back to it, but Guilford seems to disagree when he subtly grazes the bony part of Snafu’s knee by the counter.

“Come to the shop with me.” he whispers and he reeks of booze but so does Snafu.

“Hard pass.”

Guilford looks around to scope out the bar and when he sees it’s the Monday-crowd, nothing but a couple of sad sacks staring into their drinks like the barrel of a gun, he leans in closer.

“Come on, don’ be sucha fuckin’ tease.”

Guilford pulls out a cigarette to put in Snafu’s mouth, lights it when Snafu accepts it against his better judgment. 

“See, I was jus’ headed out.” Snafu slurs. He’s so drunk that he gets vertigo from moving his head and the smoke doesn’t make it any better, rising numbingly to his head on each inhale.

“Let’s go together.”

Snafu shakes his head derisively, holding onto the counter for stability when he attempts to get up only to have his ass fall back onto the stool.

“Headed a different way.”

“You ain’t really headed anywhere from the looks of it.”

He says it like a joke but Snafu knows the hard, threatening line that runs under it, that veiled core of truth. He curses himself as he drunkenly realizes how naïve he’d been, letting himself get roped into drink after drink and falling right where Guilford wanted him. He pushes off the stool again and doesn’t fall this time although his knees are weak and rubbery.

“‘m goin’ home.” Snafu says, hoping he’s saying it convincingly enough. If Guilford were to find out he doesn’t really, officially have a place to stay, he'd be done for so he thinks of a plan and decides to act like he’s still staying at the Sledge’s ranch.

“I’ll drive ya.”

“I’m not gett’n in a car with you that soused.”

“Walk ya, then.”

“‘s too far.”

Guilford slaps a couple of bills on the counter before he catches Snafu as he’s walking out of the bar and stands tall in front of him when they’re suddenly surrounded by night, blacker than he remembers. He wasn’t even aware the sun had set in the first place.

“Come on, Merriell, I’m just asking for a little attention, you really gon’ ditch me now? That bad of a lay, am I?”

“Don’t fucking call me that.”

Snafu stubbornly stalks ahead, the fact he has to walk to the ranch for over an hour slowly dawning on him. The street lights provide little in terms of vision and Snafu feels the dull alarm that always rises within him when his back isn’t covered.

“I know you need this. Look at you.”

“Jesus, catch a _ fuckin’ _ hint.” Snafu spits, then, swaying in his spot as he stands, anger roused at the mindless, dull persistence of that brute. He raises his hands confrontationally and stares Guilford down. “I ain’t fucking you.”

Guilford hisses.

“What’s the matter with you? You want the whole town to hear us?”

“I don’t give a shit.”

“You’re such a fucking brat, you really think you’re better than me? Fucking faggot.”

“_ Oh _ , that’s _ rich _. What, you thought I was gon’ let you fuck me for a couple’a drinks?” 

Snafu laughs because by that point he thinks it’s all too bizarre, too comical to even worry about. He continues in this sentiment, having half a mind not to topple over from laughter as he’s openly mocking Guilford’s desperate attempts.

“Fuckin’ idiot. I’d get more out of it shovin’ a straw up my ass.” 

He’s just about to turn around and away from this crack so Snafu doesn’t notice the fist flying his way until he’s already hitting the concrete with the back of his head and that’s when the panic creeps in.

He has half a mind to pull his arms in front of his face and the shocks of pain come delayed and numbed from the alcohol, after that. He distantly realizes his lip has split with the coppery taste that’s spreading in his mouth and then there’s a jab in his ribcage that makes him yelp. 

Guilford’s cursing above him, calling him all kinds of things that Snafu can’t even hear with how hard his ears are ringing but he knows he’s being kicked and shoved and he knows it’s pointless to try and get up to fight back. He’s too drunk, too tired, and getting up would leave his back uncovered, leave a distance between his head and the cold hard ground that he didn’t need to close a second time. It’s more or less waiting it out for him, now, and Snafu thinks about how pathetic that is but that he treasures survival more.  
  
Suddenly there’s a flash of light in the corner of his eye and a dull voice echoes onto the street before the weight is off him and he watches Guilford fall back. 

It’s the barkeep, pulling him by the shoulders and cursing at him, then he sees the crowd of indifferent bystanders. Snafu sits up and spits, eyes cast over to where the door is left open and the rectangle of yellow lamplight. 

There’s a cop and then there’s a car and he thinks someone is helping him up by tugging at his upper arm and he stands again, no concept of what just happened.  
  
“You alright?” someone asks and Snafu doesn’t reply, just nods instead as he leans sidewards into the figure that’s supporting him. He straightens and spits again, brushing at the knees of his pants.  
  
It’s that Guilford’s infamous for it, for starting trouble and getting violent, and it’s now that it comes in handy when he’s dragged into the back of a car to sleep out his inebriety in the slammer.  
The crowd disperses and a couple of people are still out there, watching him when the door closes. Eventually, the barkeep excuses himself, after making sure Snafu is stable enough on his feet to fend for himself and there’s nothing left for him to do than start walking, to make his way back to the ranch in the hopes of not passing out by the street somewhere.

It’s a trek and it’s way too dark but it makes him sober up a little bit so that the pain in the back of his head, in his legs and ribs, his face, returns strong enough to make him weary with it.  
He walks and walks, out of town where it gets darker, down the road, past patches of forest and lamplit houses and maybe there’s something masochistic in him because he’s enjoying the melodrama, the suffering and his bruises and the way he’s overtired, more than he should.

While he’s trudging over the shortcut over some farmer’s field, there’s something hot stinging behind his eyelids. Maybe it’s the pain from his bruise or maybe the booze that’s making him melancholy but as he walks past the moonlit pond, finally a familiar view, he vaguely realizes there are tears in his eyes. He stares stubbornly ahead as if it isn’t happening if he’s not minding it, but it’s all glassy and aching and he’s heaving with the weight of the fucking world on his chest. He’s sore, he’s so sore and so tired and all he wants is that one speck of softness and gentleness that he needs to beat himself out of craving, and when he arrives at the barn, his makeshift home, he’s relieved and desperately lost at the same time. _ Home _.

There sits Eugene, waiting up, next to him the apples and next to that the torn-up note. He staggers and nearly falls when Eugene gets up to confront him and it’s so absurd he laughs.

“Thought I told you not to wait up, Genie.”

Like the puppy dog he is, Eugene barks:

“Where the hell were you?”

Snafu stays quiet at that, bringing his face into the light from the flickering bulb above the door with the next step and Eugene must see because his demeanor changes entirely.

“Shit, what happened?”

He steps into Snafu’s vicinity and reaches out for his face, brows tugging into a worried frown, to get a good look at him, to softly tilt his face this way and that but Snafu leans away from that bright red touch.

“Got into a fight. ‘S fine, I’ll be outta your hair.”

“No, you’re-”

“I said it’s _ fine _.” 

His voice has that brash quality to it, that sting, the bristling defense. It comes out loud enough to startle Eugene into withdrawing his hand and the crazy part of him ardently wants it back. He can clearly tell Snafu’s drunk and Snafu can drunkenly tell it’s not sitting right with Eugene, righteous Eugene.

“Shelton, tell me what happened.”

Eugene asks him again but this time there’s something hard beneath his voice that’s unfamiliar to Snafu in how commanding it is. His hand is back by his side but he’s not giving in and Snafu has to look away from the steely expression in Eugene’s eyes.

“Got punched, can’t you tell.”

“By who?”

“Does it matter?”

Eugene sighs and he’s about to fight, Snafu recognizes, with how he’s huffing and the way his jaw tenses up. He gains some twisted satisfaction from it, too, the joy from wrangling a reaction out of Eugene - for half a second, before the sour taste is back in his throat and he falls forward and throws up straight before both their feet. Eugene jumps and Snafu takes an uneasy step back before he goes again, coming up all clear, all bile, all liquid. The stench is horrifying and he retches, holding a hand to his stomach, the other to his mouth and when he’s down to the very bottom of it, Eugene’s somehow made it off the stairs to hold a hand against his back.

“You’re such an idiot.” Eugene murmurs and it’s so soothing to hear him so close, to feel the point of warm contact where his hand is placed that Snafu thinks he could get sick with it, again. It weakens him so profoundly that he doesn’t fight when Eugene guides him toward the barn and shushes him, vaguely aware that this is where he’s being weak, this is what got him into the mess in the first place, but there’s that gentleness he’s lacked all his life and it’s too alluring to say no to.

“Let’s clean you up, hm? Get you to bed.”

“Gene, you-”

Snafu stumbles into his side and sighs with the arm wrapped tight around the back of his shoulders, the sweet, clean scent he wants to live inside of. He takes each cautious step as it approaches his field of vision and hopes that Eugene can’t tell how he’s holding onto him a little heavier than he needs to be. The door unlocks and he looks back at the uneaten apples for a split second before Eugene and he cross the threshold into the interior of the hut.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> please leave kudos and comments if you can, i'm not only regular broke but also validation-broke.
> 
> oh also BIG THANKS TO KAT for consistently saving my easily-dejected ass with their suggestions


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Look, I don’t see how it’d be a bad thing to have someone understand what we’ve been through? The war?”
> 
> Truly, the one-sidedness of their interactions rings true because when Shelton moves his head to face the wall, he’s putting an end to the topic. 
> 
> Eugene knows that some of it could be attributed to the booze but if he’s being honest, he knows that the booze only pronounces Shelton’s evasive nature instead of creating it. What he doesn’t want to say, he won’t, and there’s little regard for the other, little concern with reciprocity when it comes to that.
> 
> “I guess we’re not the same.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> settle in for 4k of nothing! of absolute nonsense!

When Eugene tries to distinguish the emotions that are wreaking havoc within him, he’s reminded of when Sidney had left for the Pacific a month before he did. It was a difficult experience, not only for the fact that he’d felt weak, pathetic even, for being held back from fighting honorably for his own country for such a petty reason - a pipe dream that he’d later gain an entirely polar perspective on - but that he’d suddenly found himself completely and utterly alone; his sounding-board, his confidante had left him behind to go without the valve that kept his at times obsessive ruminations all to stew within the confines of his mind. Maybe that’s what’s happening right now, as he peeks out the window throughout the day only to see if Shelton is back, maybe it’s the anxious prospect of losing that another time, but the way he’s shaking with the what-ifs and if-onlys has him questioning that premise.  
  
During the day, he’s pulled taut.   
The anticipation has him stumbling over to the window facing the barn every so often, just to see if he’s back, if he’s approaching, leaving, present.  
As he watches during the course of a day, the barn shifts colors ever-so-slightly during his observation. The morning paints it blue and grey and cold, the worn wood paneling rising and dipping into blacks and greys on the side facing west while to the east it looks like threads of hand-spun silver as it creaks and squeaks, unoccupied.   
At noon it looks surreal with how bright the sun is, how blue and cloudless the sky behind it and when melancholy sunset comes around it’s too golden and beautiful to stand.   
The image of it distinctly reflects how Shelton himself goes from half-asleep and distant to crude and loud to sullen, painted masks in each color to wear until night rolls around.   
When it does, it’s too dark to see so Eugene resolves to waiting by the steps.

The apples are still there and so is the note that came with it.

To Eugene’s dismay, they look absolutely delectable in their ripeness, their plump and glossy quality, but even one bite would come with that vague aftertaste of betrayal even if he can’t quite put his finger on why that is. As he’s waiting - and he’s waiting for hours that he spends in that solitary chamber all the way up in his head - it’s so difficult not to bite. He distracts himself by writing, by drawing, by reading but the apples distract back and something about their presence tugs his heart downwards with a steady and merciless pull.

Eventually he tears up the note, just to interact with the gift somehow, make it smaller or reject it, he doesn’t know - but the burden still weighs heavy and it’s ridiculous because it’s just fruit, it’s just a couple of damn apples.

Eventually, the battle is replaced by a different one:

There stumbles a creature in the dark, Shelton-shaped on unsteady feet, swaying and pathetically small with how far it’s away, still - and it’s unmistakably him with the gait and the build, even if it’s skewed, tilted. In his suspense, Eugene is tempted to hold his breath to distract from all the thoughts that are once again flooding his mind, but as Shelton’s approaching it becomes surer and he gets larger and larger and then he’s home.

There’s little pretense.

When he’s close enough to see Eugene’s waited for him he loses balance on one unsteady foot and nearly falls, prompting Eugene to grab for him in a panic. He doesn’t make it far enough before he hears him laughing, a raspy and mean sound that has him insecure, feeling as though he’s the butt of a joke.

  
“Thought I told you not to wait up, Genie.”   
The nickname inexplicably stings, childish and flippant like a pet’s name, some lapdog. He has half a mind to react to it, anger bristling, bubbling up in his core to make its way to where his hair stands on his neck.   
  
“Where the  _ hell  _ were you?”   
  
He’s seething, from the mockery, from his inability to pinpoint what’s going on in Shelton’s head; He could go stupid with the annoyance he feels and he’s just about ready to spit it all out, to snap, when the other takes a step forward, face illuminated by the little lamp outside the barn. It flickers meaningfully and the yellow of it contrasts the angry purple around his eye, the damp red his soft lips are slicked with. It looks tense and uncomfortable, skin pulling too tight, bruises too fresh and Eugene feels it too by watching him, feels the flash of pain in a perfect mirror image in his own features.   
  
“Shit, what happened?”   
  
He wants so badly to soothe the hurt that he takes a step into his vicinity, struggling not to embrace him, take care of him that vulnerable, and reaches out with the tips of his fingers touching onto the delicate line of Shelton’s jaw. He tilts it to the side to get a better look but unlike a plant leaning toward sunlight, opening up to it softly, Shelton leans away and closes in on himself.   
  
“Got into a fight.” He says. “‘S fine, I’ll be outta your hair.”

  
“No, you’re-”   
That’s the opposite of what Eugene wants; he wants him here, wants him safe.   
  
“I said it’s  _ fine _ .”   
The tone of his voice stings harder than he could have anticipated. It’s so prickly in his chest that he pulls away, withdraws his hand within a split second, the white-hot pain of Shelton’s rejection following in aftershocks through his arm.

He’s ridiculously drunk, Eugene realizes now that he’s heard him slur his words in a longer sequence and that worries him infinitely more, raising even more questions, even more potential scenarios in that blackbox, source of Shelton’s erratic behavior.   
  


He’s overtired and tender from Shelton’s unpredictability, the frustration reaching his tone of voice when he asks again, speaks like he used to speak during combat.

“Shelton, tell me what happened.”

It seems to work because the smugness dissolves and Shelton no longer meets his eyes.

“Got punched.” He says.

“Can’t you tell?”

“By who?” Eugene spits back and he’s pushing it, he knows he is but-

“Does it matter?”

It’s agonizing and feels like dull labor, the way Shelton keeps playing with him, the way he has to pull every little thing from him as if he were pushing boulders.

  
He sighs with the weight of it and is about to stalk away or fight or both before Shelton’s suddenly toppling over, a clear stream of vomit splashing disgustingly at the end of his feet. He jumps and sees Shelton struggle, taking an uneasy step back and he looks like he’s caught balance - before he goes again. 

Eugene can’t help but sympathize even though he knows he shouldn’t and that no matter how tormented, Shelton is ultimately still the source of his own suffering. And yet, regardless of his little rationalizations he helps him up and puts a hand to his back, unable to deter himself from the need to protect when Shelton seems so small, so much smaller than he really is.

“You’re such an idiot.” Eugene mumbles, still sore from the conflict but much softer and helps him take each step as a pillar to lean on.

“Let’s clean you up, hm? Get you to bed.”

“Gene, you-”

Shelton starts but never finishes, seemingly having lost that trail of thought - unsurprising, with the level of his inebriety. He’s given up the fight, though, so Eugene takes that as his silver lining and walks him into the room, struggling to fit them both through the door simultaneously.

Once he’s past the line between outside and in, the first thing he notices is the smell.

It’s mostly wood, of course, with the house having stood there for as long as he can remember, but there’s something else to it, something new. When he inhales he’s momentarily transported to the volatile sea, salty and brash and stinging in his eyes, and then to a home that looks nothing like the house he lives in. 

It’s vacant like he expects, a bunk by the bathroom door the only one that’s made and the only one that shows signs of living. Eugene wonders if it gets lonely out there, sometimes, but then he’s looking at Shelton’s heaps of belongings stray out around his bed like a halo and a delicate silver bracelet catches his eye. It winks at him through the low light of the barn but he can’t look for too long because Shelton is leaning heavily enough into his side that he’s threatening to fall.

“Come on.” Eugene says, drawing his eyes away from the thin, twisted line and back to Shelton. “I can’t carry you.”

Once in the bathroom, Eugene sits him down on the toilet, going to work by looking through the shelves in hopes of finding something, anything he can use to clean up the bruises. He has to content himself with a threadbare but clean rag that he holds under the water until it’s cool enough to soothe some of the pain.

Shelton is uncharacteristically fidgety during the whole process, flinching and squirming as Eugene holds the rag to his lip, his cheek. He holds him by the chin, thumb and index gentle and steady on the line of his jaw, two firm points of contact, while Shelton swishes water in his mouth, lips pulled into a sweet pout. 

As he’s doing, Shelton’s not looking at him but instead staring distantly ahead, then dipping his lids into a sullen expression, eyes cast lower and lashes pointing downward. With another touch of the cloth to his bruise, he jolts and subconsciously tilts his head away to which Eugene grips him a little harder.

“Sit still, Shelton.”

He commands and Shelton mumbles something in response that he can’t make out.

“What was that?” 

“I said… don’t call me that.”

It’s clearly the alcohol talking but Eugene becomes curious.

“What?”

There’s a long pause that Eugene takes as an opportunity to press the rag to his split lip.

“Call me-” A hiss of pain. “Call me Merriell.”

Eugene doesn’t know how to respond to that so he says nothing, quietly nodding as he cleans off the last bits of dried blood and lets go of Shelton’s face.

He knows that whatever moment of intimacy he’s finding himself in is solely the result of Shelton’s drunkenness and yet, he can’t help but hold onto that, feel something rise up within him that spreads warm and gooey.

He gets him to bed, after a struggle with the stubborn way Shelton clings to him and how limp his legs are but they make it and Shelton allows Eugene to lay him down and pull the blanket over him.

He’s the picture of innocence save for the nasty black eye and a split lip, and his curls nestle intimately against the pillow. He has his eyes closed but Eugene can tell from the frown on his face that he’s not yet asleep and takes that as an opportunity to sit on the edge of the bed, legs drawn close, leaning forward on his elbows while he idly watches him from the side.

It takes him a moment to speak up but when he does he’s surprised by how firm his voice is.

“Why'd you wanna leave?”

Shelton sighs and yawns, pulling his eyebrows into a frown and Eugene’s sure that if his mouth weren’t covered, he’d see the frown in that, too.

“‘M sorry.” he murmurs, but it’s not an answer, it’s not even an apology and Eugene calls him out on that.

“Just say it. Just say what’s so important that you gotta leave out of the blue.”

Despite the desperate tinge to his tone that Eugene is unable to hide he expects Shelton to spew half-truths and random excuses like he so often does. The act of asking him in itself is mostly just Eugene’s way of telling him he wants to know and less of a true conversation between the two of them. In the little time he’s known Shelton he admits that that’s often the case but in the hopes of getting Shelton to reciprocate, he’s determined to be as genuine and open as he can.

“I don’t know, I think it’s just-”

And there it is, the start of some half-truth.

“You bring back too many bad memories.”

It hurts him to hear it so openly and Eugene doesn’t know which potential scares him more: that he’s putting on an act to hide his true motives or that it’s really the truth and he can’t look past it. Regardless of it, he is wont to fight him on it because during all this time Shelton’s never shown any sign that Eugene was pushing it, no pulling away when they talked about their experiences.

“I don’t-”

Eugene starts, unsure where he’s going with that.

“I don’t get it; you seemed okay with it and-”

Trying to pull words out of thin air, Eugene is thinking on how to say what he needs to.

“Look, I don’t see how it’d be a bad thing to have someone understand what we’ve been through? The war?”

Truly, the one-sidedness of their interactions rings true because when Shelton moves his head to face the wall, he’s putting an end to the topic. 

Eugene knows that some of it could be attributed to the booze but if he’s being honest, he knows that the booze only pronounces Shelton’s evasive nature instead of creating it. What he doesn’t want to say, he won’t, and there’s little regard for the other, little concern with reciprocity when it comes to that.

“I guess we’re not the same.”

With the tension, Eugene drives his fingers through his hair and pulls at it, if only to give him a stimulus other than the skin-deep frustration that’s bating his breath.

He wants so desperately to get an answer that makes sense to him, something other than the cryptic curveballs Shelton keeps throwing him, but before he knows it Shelton’s conveniently asleep, snoring softly. 

It’s a little too much to stand, that moment, impending loneliness all over again and Eugene stays back for a while to watch him but when he gets no eureka, no sense of insight into this strange and random situation, he leaves Shelton to sleep.

-

Miraculously, Shelton decides to stay after all. The reasoning that the decision was born from a drunken frenzy makes little sense to Eugene but he decides not to dwell on it, doesn’t look the gift horse in the mouth, so to speak. The relief is palpable but it brings forth a careful dance with his father and he, needing to avoid a situation where he’d see the boy’s clearly bruised face until it’s healed enough to appear normal again.

Shelton feigns sick for a week and a half, but sneaks out of the room regardless to join Eugene while he’s doing work for two and to watch him with a stream of running commentary. It’s good to have him back to his previous, bratty self, but some of the melancholy he could have kept because while Eugene didn’t mind the work, he did mind Shelton lying on stacks of hay, alternating straw and cigarette between his lips and telling him what he should do, shouldn’t do, how to,  _ no _ , not like  _ that- _

Once, when Eugene tells him to shut up, using his given name he becomes awkward, commentary paused, and it’s Eugene’s cue to go back to normal.

He asks about it later, however, appearing cautious and child-like in his curiosity, and when Eugene answers him, tells him that he’d asked him to call him it that night, he clasps his hands together and pouts.

“Right…” he says but it doesn’t come up again and he’s oddly quiet for the rest of the day, staring into the distance among heaps of gold like he was born to lie there, like a prince.

It’s something Eugene starts noticing more and more; now that Shelton’s by his side every day, just lazing and contemplating, Eugene has enough time to contemplate the exact extent of how good-looking he is.   
  
It starts with his hair and the texture of it, the soft, touchable dark curls framing his face, the way they slightly fan out with his head pillowed against a surface. Occasionally one of them will fall onto his forehead and it’s a perfect ringlet every time it happens, tempting Eugene to pull at it and watch it bounce back into shape. He goes lower in his mapping, fixates on his eyes for a while, how they’re much too bright for his dark complexion looking vaguely out of place yet so haltingly attractive for it, and how he can’t ever quite place what color they are. One day he thinks he pins it down and says blue but then the next day the setting sun glints off them so ephemeral and bright that they’re distinctly emerald green and wide and sweet. 

They have this comfortable, sleepy look to them, an invitation, almost intimate the way he’ll slowly walk his glance over to Eugene and regard him silently. His lashes are dark, like his complexion, and they’re paint strokes in their rich black, their downward slope. His eyes, his nose, his mouth. The pout he pulls it into, the pillowy top lip, the high-arching cupid’s bow.   
He’ll sit with it slightly agape sometimes and it pronounces that even stronger, the plump and feminine curve, especially around a cigarette or when he’s deep in thought.   
  


A couple days pass and Shelton’s starting to be in better shape and towards the end of the week he’s gotten complacent; still sore, perhaps, but in no shape to undergo helping Eugene in favor of bossing him around. It’s never hostile in nature, quite the opposite, really, some lighthearted banter to keep Eugene entertained as he’s cleaning the stalls but it does get frustrating for the sheer quantity of it - because if there’s one thing Shelton is good at, it’s his ability to chew someone’s ear off when there’s no real reason to do so. He’s ranting, he’s making up nonsense as he goes, chirpy, chatty, with the air of a teen girl, and he’s made up three ailments that he’s most definitely suffering from, gone through four monologues respectively about the inherently opportunistic nature of navy guys, the right brand of hot sauce, the way his shoes always miraculously break in the same spot and that it’s bound to be a bad sign somehow and then omens, good or bad, and how to tell the good from the bad - before Eugene’s nerves are frayed and he tells him,  _ nicely _ , to can it, and that if he was in good enough shape to rattle off, he surely was in good enough shape to lend him a hand.

Shelton jabs back and then it’s Eugene and for a while it ping-pongs back and forth until Eugene good naturedly slaps him on the back of the head and earns a kick in his general direction in response. It doesn’t connect at first but Shelton’s determined enough to get up and have a go at it and before he knows it, Eugene’s shoving at him and Shelton grabs the leg of his pants and pulls hard enough to have him fall into the hay. They’re wrestling and it’s uncomfortable with the hay getting into Eugene’s mouth just as he’s trying to push at Shelton’s cheek and he can’t really see where he’s aiming but Shelton’s limbs are a flailing mess so he must have gotten him off balance  _ somehow _ .

But what he hadn’t taken into account is how he’s falling straight into his direction and before he knows it he has an armful of Shelton pressing against his front, from toes to chest, air punched out of him from the impact, and then, for some reason, that’s where it sparks, that’s where the engine roars, where the moonlight glints.

He stops fighting within a split-second, freezing up with that sudden understanding, the realization that he’s had coming for a while now and his heart is hammering in his chest, his blood rushing in his ears when his hand accidentally makes contact with an exposed slip of waist and then it’s a haze from there.

All red-faced Eugene can see, all he has the mind to focus on, is how Shelton’s so close he can see the glint of moisture on his cupid’s bow, the wisp of stubble lining cheeks and jaw, can feel the intoxicating scent of him rise to the very top of his head like helium in funfair balloons and that he’s  _ small _ , that he’s smaller than him, from his shoulders to the tight dip of his waist, from the narrow wrists to his arms to his slender neck - and  _ god _ , the neck - too close, too exposed, too soft.

_ Attraction _ , Eugene thinks and finally has something to ascribe the word to but it’s fateful in how it happens right there because Shelton wins the fight, pins his hands, while Eugene’s gone entirely astray.

He’s not very graceful in how he hurriedly starts back to work after some half-baked excuse and leaves him be much too soon after finishing up for the day. 

He knows Shelton can tell something’s off but it’s not reaching him right because he can’t fix it, he needs a moment, needs space and having Shelton’s heady, lithe presence around is the gasoline to his fire.

He writes ferociously, that night.

It’s like he’s overcome with a sprite-like presence that has him maniacally scratching pen to paper, speaking vaguely in his descriptions but in a way that’s his specific brand of cryptic.

He smokes more, moves more, thinks more and the lump in his chest, the bright, hot lump that is his sudden and lethal affection balloons up until it reaches his toes. 

It’s everywhere, then, in every one of his thoughts and everything he sees. Sticky and burning to the point where Eugene feels it’s hard to move around it, hardly eating anything at all that night with how he’s nauseated, anxious. 

The apple he does eat is surreally fragrant but it’s nothing compared to the bright, lively eyes, the heady scent in the crook of Shelton’s neck - and as the night draws into morning he loses himself to that woe entirely.

Naturally, it becomes harder to be around him. Perversely, it becomes even harder than that to be without him. With the tremor in his hands that are straining with force as he’s trying to prevent himself from reaching out and the yearning pulling him taut like the strings of a bow, Eugene feels as though hit by some divine intervention, a cosmic joke. 

  
He’s fully lost to the absurdity of these novel and mindlessly intense feelings he’s keeping tucked away from sight, from Shelton. 

It’s weird to call him by his last name, now, too, and all he wants to do is say it over and over again, Merriell, Merriell, Merriell, but that’s been taken away from him; too shy and too fearful of his lips moving around it so affectionately that he’s baring himself for Shelton, Merriell, to see.

It comes too close to a reveal when he coyly asks if Shelton wanted to sit by the lake after they’ve worked all day. He falls stupidly close to not measuring himself, not saying it as nonchalantly as he can.    
With how restless he’s been since his epiphany, it’s that tiptoe that drives him the craziest; mercilessly falling victim to his own censorship and the masks he crafts to put on around Shelton so as not to spook him, drive him distant. 

Shelton agrees to his request and Eugene doesn’t know which way it’s easier - revel in his presence like a madman, psychopathically relishing in his scent, the urge to pull him so close their edges tremble and shake and they fall into each other, blurred,  _ one  _ \- or the being he becomes at night where all Eugene can think about is that slip of waist that was once so close and the regret that comes with not indulging in it longer. 

It’s so different from how their first encounter went: they sit just the same, drink just the same, but this time, in the dead quiet of one another.    
Eugene contemplates the erratic pattern of tree lines cutting the edges of the moonlit sky jagged and jerky - It’s teal behind where it’s black - and he thinks on how that reflects his feelings accurately: clear behind where it’s incomprehensible. 

Who’s to start the conversation, Eugene worries. Who’s to say the first word? 

With the merciless dribble of his doubts, he’s frozen still like a statue - he  _ did  _ ask Shelton to spend time, he did invite him to the lake, he did ask him, he did invite him-   
Wasn’t it on him?   
  
Shelton takes away the introduction and he’s brash like he always is.   
“I can hear you think, Gene.”   
  
In a panic: “Yeah? So what am I thinking?”   
  
“Dunno.” comes the answer and it’s lovely, even that, even the little shrug from him, the dip of his lids through the rose-colored lens.   
“But probably in circles.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> please leave kudos and a keysmash if you enjoyed


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “What with last night-” he starts and Eugene immediately interjects.  
“You’re alright.”
> 
> Shelton hesitates, tugging at the button on the sleeve of his cord jacket before he abandons it. Eugene ignores the shadow of guilt that crosses his face.  
“You know, I don’t wanna lie to you.”
> 
> “You weren’t. Omitting ain’t the same as lying.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ok so this has been sitting in my docs for so fucking long now and my life is pretty much a roller coaster right now and so i don't have the energy to worry about my writing being "good enough" so there you have it, chapter 5 almost two months later, from a depressed bitch
> 
> Yours Truly
> 
> PS.: it's cut off weird so maybe go back to the end of the last chapter to see wtf i'm even saying here

As he’s watching Shelton absently draw ripples into the mirror-like surface of the lake, bare-toed and quiet, Eugene feels like he’s going crazy with the ambiguity of the whole exchange. There’s a glass wall now stood between them, constructed through his epiphany. It feels as though it’s dulling the words on either side, like his head’s underwater, like it’s another piece of polished glass in those mirror cabinets at fun fairs: easily mistaken for an opening where bumping into one, the blind, implicit barrier, hurts just as much as running headfirst into a window.

When he tries to narrow it down to the essence of it, Eugene is tired. For the last few nights he’d been feverishly awake during the night and bleary-eyed during the day, torn between that treble of absence and presence, pulled one arm to wanting him close and the other to needing him gone for Eugene’s ineptitude of handling his presence. 

In this, every thought is diminished by the next, two equally strong forces rendering him frozen in his place, desire and caution. Some days he’s agonizingly self-aware, spectator in his own experience and deconstructing each word to its ultimate, original meaning. Then others there’s nothing but the greedy pull of his heart, the intensity of his affection he submits to, to breathing him in, to watching him at his least-watched. Then he ruminates, endlessly, hunched over ink and pen and loses himself to it, proves, disproves, hypothesizes, schemes, as if thinking about it would solve it.

In a similar manner to his stretching torture he wants to avoid his truth to surface, and with each passing day it’s making him distant and quiet to the point of repression.

The whole ordeal is agony. It’s ruminating, overthinking, doubt - every worst trait of Eugenes left to stew on the white-hot furnace that is Shelton’s presence. 

But he can’t dwell on it, because suddenly it’s been too long since the last words have been said and he’s listening to the deafening silence stretch out between them like an awkward embrace.

In an attempt to break some of the walls, he reaches for Shelton’s pack of cigarettes, propped open on the ground next to him and wordlessly takes one.

With shaking hands he brings it to his lips, fumbles for a lighter, hoping to break the trance he finds himself in, all nerve, all jitters.

It earns him a raise of the eyebrows and a mischievous look that Eugene wishes he could wipe off his stupid, handsome face.

“What’s going on with you?” 

Shelton is the first to talk. The way he’s holding his chin up, tilted in that way of his that’s both cause for the spark of desire in Eugene’s belly and frustratingly aloof has Eugene insecure. He’s looking too fiercely into him, the buttery green eyes flitting over his face, his mouth. Maybe he can tell.

Before Eugene replies, Shelton reaches over to light his cigarette for him, broad-knuckled, all up in his space, and Eugene is overcome with the temptation to bite at his fingers, in warning or to hold him there, he’s not sure.

“Things have been weird.”

“Yeah?”

With the first pressed exhale of smoke, Eugene tries his best to relax his shoulders and leans back, arms propped behind him. His shoulders sag, like he’s carrying his nervous ruminations in his neck from where they’re overflowing in his head. His joints pop when he stretches his legs but then Shelton’s staring, sweeping glance over the length of his body, and he’s immediately rendered self-conscious.

“What?” Eugene asks, takes the cigarette out from between his lips, dangling it between forefinger and thumb. Stupidly.

“Nothin’.” 

The way they flit, his eyes are light like faulty wiring. Up to his face and back again.

“Just thinkin’ on how you’ve gotten darker.”

Then they find a spot, pointedly fixed some inches above Eugene’s navel where the shirt’s rode up from his stretch. Eugene promptly curls in on himself to hide.

“Oh, shut _ up _.” 

“Startin’ to look like a real man, there, Genie.”

Eugene’s coloring into that unflattering red, feeling his cheeks, the tips of his ears heat up.

“I’d have that on you, then.” he spits back but he inwardly curses at how weak it comes out. Shelton be damned, biting into him every chance he gets.

“Ah, you’re jus’ jealous.”

“What, of your short ass?”

“Of my ass, in general.” Shelton turns from where he’s lying on his back to emphasize his point in a crude gesture, with a slap but it’s so out of touch with the reality that’s pressing against Eugene from the inside that he hardly listens.

“You know I pull.”

“Hey, Shelton.”

He then interrupts the jovial tone and the laughter becomes an afterthought, suddenly cut off, still echoing. He braces himself for the question he’s trying to ask, his voice alarmingly lower and more somber. Shelton’s eyes glint where his expression turns wary. Mercurial.

“Who was it that beat you up?”

There they are, the loose threads of that night, untied and tangled, not forgotten despite Eugene’s revelation.

Shelton looks like he knew he had it coming. He clasps his hands together in that funny manner of his, turning his head into the moonlight to avoid Eugene’s eyes. The dead quiet of the night sets between them, a tar-slow, dreadful spread and the moment where he could still take it back passes despite Eugene increasingly wanting to.

“Alright.” he starts, letting him, and Eugene’s bated breath, the leash around his throat, grows tighter.

“You really wanna know?”

Eugene nods. The question’s been on his mind for so long he hardly knows himself without it. It’s become a part of himself as much as of Shelton’s ever-persistent mystery. 

“He was the- he’s the owner of the farm from my previous gig.”

“Okay.”

“Got too drunk, that night. He got all crazy. It just kinda happened.”

Eugene doesn’t believe that, too familiar with the games Shelton plays, with the way he’s always one step ahead, all wit, all push.

“What did you do?” Eugene urges and Shelton scoffs notably, loud enough to startle.

“Why is it I always gotta have done something? It wasn’t my fault!”

“That’s not what I’m saying.”

“Then why’s it sound like it?”

Internally, Eugene is scrambling for a way to get him out of his defense and he sighs, trying to string his words into a bandage. 

The fact he can’t be straight with him, that he’s always in that labyrinth of hidden meanings and hints and unanswered questions tires him to no end, thrown into the game whether he likes it or not.

“So, just out of the blue?”

“No, I mean-” _ Ha _. He bites.

“Look, I said some stuff he didn’t like. That’s all, Gene, he got really pissed, then he punched me and I was too drunk to do anything about it. Happy?”

_ No _, Eugene wants to say. He wants to push it further but by the way Shelton’s squirming he knows that’s the end of the line. Shelton’s acting funny and that’s where the real covert truth comes in. 

To Eugene, it indicates that that point is the last rock to turn, where he’d find his missing puzzle piece and things would start clicking into place but alas, there’s always a time limit to this game of theirs.

From the months he’s known him, he’s learned that if he were to push it now, he’d jump two steps back in his progress.

“Can’t say I wasn’t involved but it was mostly bad luck.

_ Mostly bad luck _ \- Something makes it seem like that’s what Shelton’s used to.

When Eugene says nothing more and allows some space for it all to settle he can tell that the very soft start of a look between them is starting to bud. Shyly, Shelton looks at him from the corner of his eye, as if checking if Eugene believes him, and when he responds in kind, he awkwardly tucks his chin against his chest. 

The mannerism reminds him of how children look when they lie, the telltale sign of it hidden in the wary contemplation of the story’s reception and while it’s hard to see on account of the dark, he expects nothing more to come of it.

And just as he’s about to get up, call it a night, Shelton shifts beside him and scoots closer until his head finds Eugene’s shoulder and his arm fits snugly to Eugene’s.

His heart goes mad. He sees their elongated reflections on the surface of the lake, mirrored back and twisted. He feels a tickle of curls brushing against his cheek and wonders - all the while it spreads through him, his guts, his knees, his lungs - what it was that prompted Shelton to do such a thing.  
Eugene leans into it because he can’t not. Despite his objective to not let it show, he’s weak against the machinations of his body, weak against the soft scent, the well of melancholy in a person that still hasn’t let him figure out what goes on behind the scenes. He leans in subtly and braces himself against the cool fall wind where it breaches through his clothing but he can’t help but feel warm, the rise of that blinding light from within.

-

The next day they’re supposed to take the trip out into a patch of forest that’s part of the Sledge’s land. There’s a feeding trough for the game and it’s a ways north so they find themselves saddling a horse each at the break of dawn. It’s getting colder in the mornings now and Eugene has difficulty distinguishing the cigarette smoke he’s exhaling from the puffs of condensation that show up against the pink morning sky. He’s a little nervous. Not only on account of the fact it’s been a long time since Eugene’s been on horseback but also with Shelton’s presence weighing heavier and heavier by the minute. In an attempt to distract himself he tries to familiarize himself with the easy rise and fall of his body as the steed is trodding over the uneven ground. He keeps his hips slack and his spine taut, easily falling back into every step and it’s therapeutic to find that focus somewhere, the feeling of something live and warm and breathing under him.

It’s quiet between Shelton and himself, the latter clearly not all thawed to the day yet. As they embark on their journey Eugene wordlessly falls into step behind him, eyes cast out down the narrow dirt path and wordlessly reaches into the pocket of the saddle to produce a thermos of coffee. Without pretense Shelton takes it from him.

If Eugene weren’t so goddamn tired he’s sure he’d appreciate it more. The picture of rose-gold, the light that filters through the white steam in that harmonious way when Shelton opens it, the sun peeking over the horizon and the first threads of gold falling against the side of Shelton’s face, dripping over his set of lashes. Eugene can’t help but stare, tucking his freezing fingers into the sleeves of his sweater while he wishes it were him who raised his hand into that gentle caress of Shelton’s cheek. Its soft, boyish slope, the stubble from a shave skipped - he aches for the texture with the shadow of it that his mind supplies him with.

Shelton’s riding is infuriatingly effortless. Slack enough to move with the impact but steady in the roll of his hips, the slow, sure roll of his hips and it has Eugene envious and wanting at the same time, the way that makes it look like he was born on a horse and that has Eugene’s mind going to all kinds of indulgent ideas. He passes back the thermos with an uttered “thanks”, the sleepy disgruntledness still casting his voice, but his cheeks are starting to warm under his lingering summer tan.

Sometime about an hour in they take a break. Eugene trades a cigarette in return for the last of his coffee that he watches Shelton hunch over. The tip of his nose is tucked into hiding between his hands and he’s inhaling the scent, red-rimmed eyes fluttering closed against the warmth.

They share that moment of quiet companionship but as Shelton slowly wakes, rising with the blue the sky is starting to color into, so does his talk.

“What with last night-” he starts and Eugene immediately interjects.

“You’re alright.”

Shelton hesitates, tugging at the button on the sleeve of his cord jacket before he abandons it. Eugene ignores the shadow of guilt that crosses his face.

“You know, I don’t wanna lie to you.”

“You weren’t. Omitting ain’t the same as lying.”

The thermos finds its way back into the pocket on Eugene’s saddle, where his horse is stood next to the log they’re sitting on. Shelton craves for something to do with his hands.

When Eugene glances over he finds Shelton smiling to himself but something about it is melancholy and small. It’s just a little quirk of his mouth while his eyes are glazed over and don’t mirror the expression. He looks like he’s swallowing against something in his throat.

“Right.” he adds but it sounds dejected.

“I’m just saying, I’d rather have you tell me half the story than a made-up one.”

“Okay then-” he starts, molding the tips of his fingers against his nose. 

“Maybe you’ll get the second half some other day.”

It’s almost noon when they arrive at the first stop and Eugene’s knees pop when he stretches his legs. Shelton’s warmed up now, thank god, but something about him is still different from his usual self-assured demeanor. Eugene can’t really pin it down when he contemplates it because he replies the same, acts the same. There’s just an unidentifiable fog around him that Eugene vacantly recognizes as _ off _ and as much as he tries to honor Shelton’s space, it gets in the way of them being amicable as usual.

When Shelton steps out the saddle and reaches to loosen the ropes on his pack, Eugene watches the play of muscles under his sinewy forearms. He’d abandoned the jacket and tied it lazily around his waist where it sits like the centerpiece on a dinner spread, drawing Eugene’s attention to the narrow dip of it. He takes one fluttering breath before he joins in and empties a bag of feed into the trough but it doesn’t take long for him to stumble and have the pellets scatter all across the damp, mossy ground.

He expects to be scolded for it - Shelton’s quick wit ever-persistent on teasing him - but nothing comes and Eugene starts worrying he’s said something wrong. He cleans up with that embarrassed sting in his cheeks and all Shelton does is watch him, distantly, unnervingly.  
  
Sometimes the presence of that strange creature is what unsettles Eugene the hardest. The animal hidden under, the deep, dark core of him. With the eerie, unblinking eyes, Eugene sometimes feels like Shelton isn’t even from this world, like there’s something about him that’s above all their petty human endeavors. He feels as though he’s an observant, passively noting from the sidelines before he slips back into his persona and makes no show of having stowed away the minute details, his discoveries, for later.

By the fourth time they halt Shelton makes a comment on how Eugene’s staring and his lip twitches and his eyes linger. The statement is concise but the way it echoes has Eugene distinctly aware of how he’s being bared despite his efforts of keeping it tucked away from sight.

In an uneasy transition, they fall into a routine. Eugene is handling the map with the crossed out spots and gives directions and Shelton passively obeys. Stop by passing stop the weight on the horses gets lighter and the strange atmosphere, while still persistent, less palpable, or simply paid less mind to. 

Before he knows it Eugene’s riding through a quiet dusk, enveloped by indigo, by cardinal blue and black. The light of the lanterns they each brought dances hypnotizingly in his vision - little orange sprites drawing lines into the jelly sky - and he gets so caught up in it that he barely notices the faint, distant rumbling from above. Until it gets louder, that is, becomes an angry growl that has Eugene looking up and squinting against the dark when it’s getting too hard to ignore.

He threads his fingers through the mane on his horse and nervously calls out to Shelton, twice before he hears him.

“You hear that?”

“Pretty hard not to.”

He pulls at the bridle to steer backwards and falls into step with Eugene.

“How long ‘til we make it back?”

  
Jittery silence, Shelton’s face thrown into a sharp relief by the lamplight, partially too stark, partially obscured.  
  


“Uh, about an hour?”

Shelton kisses his teeth.

“Shortcuts?”

With the meagre light the lamp provides, Eugene has a hard time reading the gilded, leathery map in his hands. Shelton helpfully supplies his own and the closer he gets, the louder the humming electricity between Eugene’s ears becomes, like Shelton’s radiating that energy of cosmic dark that he’s secretly made of.

Pointing a finger to the map, Eugene traces the dotted lines on the paper as he tries to estimate their location. With nightfall looming behind them it’s starting to grow colder, too, and he has to bite against a full-body shiver from the gush of wind the brooding storm is summoning.

“What about here?” Shelton asks and he’s leaned over close enough that his ankle touches onto Eugene’s shin where the horses are huddled together.

“That’s crossing that farmer’s land.” Eugene replies but he knows it won’t fly.

“So?”

“I’d feel bad for messing up his acres.”  
“Worse than gettin’ thrown off the back of your horse when it startles from the lightning?”

  
Shelton has a point. The lingering humidity and the charged air are only symptoms of something much larger that is to come and from the feel of them, it’s going to be a spectacle. Eugene gives it an hour at most, when he thinks about how low the swallows were flying all day and how the darkness had settled too abruptly - no sunset, just a sudden, sticky black.  
  
“Come on.” Shelton urges. “We don’t got a choice.”  
Eugene knows he’s right but something about it feels uneasy, as though he’s jumping headfirst into unknown waters.

Like needles through cloth they thread through the narrow gaps between cedar trees off the beaten track. The way the ground gives under his horse’s hooves has Eugene clinging to the swell of his saddle, digging his fingernails in hard enough he’s sure to leave crescent moon-shaped imprints on the rough leather. He’s getting weary, heaving about with each knock of the difficult terrain under him, too tired to sit tight, to move with the dips and rises. Shelton looks about the same where he’s riding a few feet ahead, hardly more than a lazy black silhouette and the dancing spot of lamplight in Eugene’s vision. As the storm is rapidly approaching - and Eugene can tell it is, the hollow tin drum cacophony from the sky getting louder by the minute - he spurs on his horse, digging his heel into her side. The relief is palpable when they’re finally breaching the end of the forest, the trees thinning out into wispy, long things and a wide plane appears before him where he can already see the constellation of his house’s lit windows against the backdrop of the vast, angry sky. 

He hesitates.

As they’re riding down the steep hill with the horse’s staggered, irregular steps Eugene becomes anxious where Shelton speeds up. The high barbed wire fence that is approaching alarmingly cuts a slash through his vision. They’re nearing the line that segments the two plots.

He sees Shelton slope the curve between downhill and flat and that’s where he leans forward and holds on tight, jumping his feet into the soft underbelly of his horse and prompting it to go faster, faster. He seems to be entirely without trepidation about trespassing, seems to be revelling in the forbiddenness of the act and the closer he gets, the harder he leans in, approaching the barbwire fence in dizzying speed. Right before the jump, Eugene distantly wonders if he’d ever thought about competing on horseback, what with that dynamic stance of his and then, there he goes, and Eugene’s struck with awe at the elegant curve of the jump and the subsequent impact he moves into like molten butter. It looks nothing short of easy but with the height of the thing, Eugene knows it’s not. The fence, were he to stand in front of it, would reach all the way up to his ribcage and the thought alone is nauseating. Any hesitation, any wrong move could scratch up the horse’s shin and startle her, throwing him right over her head. He could fall, he could get clipped after, he might even make it over the damn thing and end up too weak to absorb the collision with the ground beneath. 

As he’s coming down the hill and onto the flat of the plane, he notices he’s slowing down and it’s not helpful how, by the time he gets face to face with the fence, he’s stood completely still. Shelton’s stopped now, on the other side of it and gives him a look Eugene recognizes as puzzled despite the darkness.

“What’re you doing?” he yells, loud enough to be heard over the distance, over the rumble of the stormy sky.

“Eugene, you gotta come _ now _!”

It’s not helping in the least, the way his voice is sounding mildly panicked and he’s turning his head upwards, swiftly, then back to Eugene.

“_ Come on _!” he urges.

But Eugene is frozen in his spot, contemplating the menacing spikes on the rusty wire. Wordlessly, he follows them like reading a book, taking in each spidery, protruding tack.

“I don’t know if I can.” he says to himself rather than Shelton.

“What?”

“I don’t know if I can!” Eugene repeats, louder.

“Well, you don’t got much of a choice there, boo, so _ get _!”

Shelton turns around to him and approaches the fence back the way he came. He’s still restless but Eugene can tell he’s trying his hardest to appear reassuring.

“Gene, she can tell you’re scared. I know you can do it but she don’t - ‘sides you don’t got much time to dwell on it anyway.”

Dejected, scolded like a little boy, Eugene tucks his chin to his chest, eyes still cast onto the mean line of the fence.

“Get back there-” Shelton points to the start of the hill. “...Speed up real good and then keep speeding up ‘til you can’t go any faster. And for the love of god, don’t slow down. She’ll feel your doubt, Gene, you just don’t gotta let her slow down.”

On a shuddery inhale, Eugene raises his shoulders until his back is pulled taut, arm to arm. Then he exhales, let’s it all leave him, and his shoulders sag.

“Okay.” he says. Then louder. “Okay!”

The trek back to the start of the hill feels like pulling a bowstring, crackling like the deck of an old ship, the anxiety in the way he tries to breathe it out, zoned-in, dead-focused despite the nervous rattle in his head. Wartime guts don’t necessarily translate to post-war bravery because while he’s been through worse, gone into scarier situations than this, he still shies all the same.

The moment where he turns around though, he realizes that concentrating on the fence won’t do him any good. It’s too much an invisible wall, the obstacle in his way. He thinks on what Shelton said - that the horse will feel him hesitating - and then spins it further into how this barrier is the source of his hesitation, so instead he fixates on the little spot of light, the captured sprite that is the lamp in Shelton’s hand. The tunnel closes in where he sees nothing outside of it, becoming one single mind that has one single objective: making it to Shelton.

As he’s kicking his heel into the point of his horse’s hip to spur her into gallop he pictures Shelton on the other side, sees him how he’d like to see him. Indulgent and soft there’s the curve of his lips, the stubble-lined jaw the slopes elegantly into his neck. He imagines Shelton letting his head roll back and exposing it, on his messy bed or out in the fields over a carpet of spring-green grass. The part of him that’s remained animalistic sees himself biting hard enough to get a yelp

and he revels in the make-believe sound, in what he likes to think is a surprised, high-pitched little thing tethering out into a satisfied groan.

With that in mind he speeds into gallop and with the fence rapidly approaching, he leans forward and makes himself streamlined, fit to tunnel through the gush of wind that’s getting stronger with his increasing pace.

He imagines the coarse texture of Shelton’s curls, his hands in them when he guides his head to look up at him, shiny thunderstorm eyes, glossy and sleepy but feverishly intense. The pattern of the gallop thuds like Shelton’s heartbeat under his bare, sweat-slicked skin, the arch of his bronze-sculpture back delicate. He’d mold his hands into it on each side, press his thumbs into fat and skin, ride his fingers over the jut of his hipbone like counting sheep, one by one, crossing the line, jumping the fence.

Before he even knows it, the distance closes to a few feet and the speed has him dizzy, lightheaded and his mind goes back to where he needs it, back to Shelton. Just before the jump he sees it - the dying flicker of his imagination provide him with Shelton, letting his mouth fall open. And then, as he jumps, as he’s airborne and nervous and scared and exhilarated his fingers, index and middle, breach past his lips, push into that wet, generous mouth.

It all dissolves with the landing, dissolves with the brash thud of the horse’s hooves coming into contact with the soil beneath. It’s partially the impact and partially the overjoyed shouts from Shelton that snap him out of it but he’s disillusioned suddenly, the zoétrope of his imagination coming to a halt and revealing the stark reality of things. He almost feels guilty for that indulgent moment of weakness where he pervertedly used, abused Shelton and this irrational affection he harbours toward him - but he can’t. The moment has him fiery from navel to knees, burning up inside-out with an uncharacteristic greed and he's so emboldened from it that it's threatening to go to his head. The viewing of this imaginary film has passed and the image dissolved and while all that’s mirroring it still is the sudden point of contact between Eugene’s shoulder and Shelton’s hand, it's like Eugene's awake now, fully conscious, fully aware of how deep this desire extends. The hard knock of his hand on Eugene's shoulder jostles him as Shelton congratulates him on the jump.

“Told you you could do it!” Shelton shouts and Eugene hardly has the mind to react, looking at him before he lowers his eyes into a shy smile. The praise hits in the best way imaginable, how proud he seems of Eugene, how thrilled - it’s intense because it’s _ his _.

He doesn’t get into deconstructing it any further because the sudden flash of lightning startles his horse into a frenzied couple of steps and reminds him of the initial objective. Shelton’s already way ahead of him when he gets her to calm down, quicker and more nimble than he, and prone to reminding him of it.

By the time Eugene’s coming up the gravel path to his home, the back of his neck is sore from the freezing rain, the smattering of a thousand needle points. He’s numb from the cold and his hair is soaked, sticking uncomfortably to his forehead and every muscle in his body, every bone, every nerve-ending hurting and tired and prickly. He’s so worn he thinks he could pass out on the porch but they need to close up and barricade the stables so the horses don’t freak and it’s with a stubborn set to his brows that he rides the last half-mile. They patch up quick; doors locked, horses each in their stall before he’s handing Shelton wet, splintery wooden planks that the other nails into place as a barricade with his fingers red and swollen from the cold and then it’s finally time to get the hell inside and out of that goddamn weather. 

But as Shelton turns on his heels to walk down the habitual path to the barn, Eugene grasps him by the arm.

“Where the hell are you going?”

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> writing is like, i don't really give a shit about it but i'm doing it anyway
> 
> (for the love of god PLEASE tell me something nice)


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _"Snafu shifts his weight onto his side and finds that Eugene is already watching him. Their eyes meet and somewhere between his own set of eyes and Eugene’s there’s an electric current crackling, like a thin, shared thread of consciousness that spans from Snafu’s pupils to Eugene’s. Eugene, who’s lying on his side as well, head propped into his hand, Eugene who flicks his eyes over every part of his face as if he were trying to memorize it. The wind whistles through the cracks of the old Colonial style house. Snafu blinks. Thunder cracks. Eugene blinks."_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> squidward-kissing-exam-paper.jpeg

_ “Where do you think you’re going?” _

_ It’s one of those dry-hot afternoons in July. The window is a bright, orange panel in the center of the brown wall, hardly obscured by the sheen of curtains on either side. Like pebbles in a river the pollen and dust winks back at him, in that headlight-like gap between the two bold ends. It’s too heavy, the room, or maybe it’s the weight of his guilt, a viscous and black lick in his chest. A cheap, kitschy little Mother Mary glances down at him through her iridescent acrylic tears, suffering her second nature like it is his. Snafu is getting dressed and the sock brushes over the scar by his ankle and he wonders if that was also the little figurine's doing - that he wasn’t hit in the stomach or the heart. _

_ “What d’you want?” _

_ Guilford shrugs, eyes cast solemnly on the face-down family photo. He’s frowning or maybe it’s just his stubborn set of brows that makes it look like he is - isn’t it kind of a cliché to put the family picture face-down anyway? Snafu thinks it makes it worse, the acknowledgement, amidst the garish pink of the room_

_“It’s that you never stay.” and then “They’re not coming back until tomorrow.”_

_ “Hope for their sake they’re not coming back at all.” _

_ Flat-mouthed silence. He sighs before he softens and turns around, humoring that hunched over figure as he smokes, rolls to his stomach, sun-scarred skin, pillar of ash dropping on the flowery duvet - the kind that a calloused foot would cling onto like barbed wire. The kind that’s not made for them. _

_ “Would that make you stay?” _

_ The question hangs in the air like the wispy-blue threads of smoke welling forth from that cigarette. Hangs in the air like the sigh that follows it. _

_ “‘S too risky.” _

_ “It’s not.” _

_ I can’t. You can. _

_ “I miss you, after.” _

_ Shelton squints at him like he’s trying to assess something, trying to fit the pieces together. He’s caught wondering if he’d just looked at him right, in the right angle just below the jawbone, with the right light that’s just short of too dark - if he could ever fall in love here. He tries. He wants to because he doubts he’d find it anywhere else. _

_ “I’m going out.” _

_ \--- _

_ Snafu, were he to rank his habits from best to worst, would put his habit of putting liquor where there’s pain, dead last. But then again, Snafu doesn’t like to stick his fingers into every little nook and cranny of his thoughts like that, thinks that he couldn’t ever really understand himself if he tried. He’s learned to live with those elusive impulses of his constantly pulling him this way and that, sneaking up on him. But that’s what he drinks for.  
And once the decision has been made, even that little flicker of awareness is of no use - nothing but a soon to be drowned question of self-preservation quickly to be sweeped under the carpet among all the other worries - simply because it’s too small an adversary in face of that monstrous heap of pain. He’s had enough heartache to last him a lifetime, and if he can’t change his life, he’s gotta change his outlook. Rose-coloured glasses and all that. Like a consolation prize. No wins this time but drinks are on the house. _

_ Snafu has no friends of his own here. He used to, but he’s bad at keeping them. Better at making them anyhow, and better at keeping them if it involves drinking.  
  
Out here, he’s with the other dead-beat farmers and they’re distinctly not friends. It’s too narcissistic an endeavor for them to be. He gains more from keeping them around and comparing himself favourably to them than the actual connection that lies underneath. Most of them are older than him and uglier too and that’s what makes it. There’s some solace in how everything is relative, how he’s not the only one with an empty crevice where the soul should be. He’ll drink with the other farmhands, he’ll drink with the lady behind the counter - skinny and old like she's part of the building, better suited for sipping iced tea on a porch during a sunset - he’ll drink with Guilford, Guilford’s friends. Anyone, just so he's not alone. _

_ When he’s at the bar, looking left and right, there’s red, swollen noses - the kind that look like moons with their crater-like pores, so beat from the sun, so fat . Hearing left and right, the kind of laughter that tethers on desperate - the kind that’s one hitch away from becoming a sob._

_ When he stumbles out into the dark, puts the door between himself and the frenzy, he can hear a TV somewhere, or a radio or the drive-in and it says: _

_ “This is your home too, you know. There are people here who love you.” _

_ And just then, Guilford finds him. _

\---

  
  


_ Rise with the sun and fall with it too. _

The room is cast in lightning-bright, two times in a row. It sings behind Snafu’s eyelids, orange, red, coral. Like he can feel the current of it pinning him to a clothes-line and releasing him just as quick.

_ Creature night-black. _

The way Eugene’s handwriting curves sepia-dark over the grainy paper is quiet like him, but its weight carries over just the same. In a way, it looks exactly the way Eugene talks; just polite enough he could say the vilest things and still never be rude, soft enough for the determined line to be just short of bossy. Snafu’s hunched over the letters - are they letters, poems? - like he used to hunch over his C-rations. Hungrier as he’s eating.

He’s bathed in him now, fully engulfed in everything that is him, an embrace, a womb. The room around him has his scent, present and past, buried in the cracks in the hardwood and the gaps between the pages of each book and Snafu watches as the slow gradient in the foot-high stack of paper next to his desk goes from gilded at the bottom to white at the top. He’s memorizing each record of Eugene’s history the room shows. The markings on the doorframe from when he was growing. Bristled, worn leather shoes peeking out from the half-opened closet. As recent as the button-up thrown over the arm-chair and the overflowing paper bin.

The yelling from downstairs doesn’t quite register - the raised voices and the kind of irritable that comes with being cooped up with people that you only love with distance - and Snafu hears it like he’s underwater. All that there is is Eugene, Eugene, Eugene. Name, scent, taste of him coursing through his every fibre, grand-scheme type presence even though he’s so soft-spoken.

The rattle of the stairs, someone stomping their way up them. Shortly after, the clack of the doorknob against drywall, where there’s a dent expecting it.

“I’m sorry.”

Says Eugene and the line of his body is slack, exhausted and Snafu doesn’t really know what for. For the first time, he notices the dark circles under his eyes - a contrast to the younger version of him Snafu has crafted via the dent in the door frame that says 4’2 above it in pencil. The yellowing light contributes too, the kind that latches onto all blues like a parasite. Whatever it is has him yearning to reach out and smooth over them and wonder if Eugene would do the same to him, in return.

In response to the apology Snafu hardly has the time to reassure him before he notices Eugene’s eyes darting anxiously to the desk next to him and the rise of colour to his pale cheeks, a rosy flush to them.  
“Did you-” he starts and steps over, between table and man and grasps for the papers that are scattered all across the mahogany surface. Snafu takes a step back with the breach, parting from the table like half a herd of sheep kept in check by a dog. He watches Eugene rearrange them with a tense line to his mouth. Pink.  
“Couldn’t have-” Snafu lies. “Can’t read cursive.”

The tension dissipates as quickly as it had hardened him and Eugene deflates, relieved.

“What, you talk shit about me or something?” Mask back on.

Watching him in the dim lamplight like this, it’s as comfortable as it is different. The same kind of awkwardness that Snafu mistook to be an inherent quality to him has disappeared. Instead, his shoulders seem wider and firmer. Fingers more nimble. In the golden lamplight with the golden glow that reflects off of Eugene’s auburn hair he has his head held high. The browns and reds and yellows, the stormy grey from outside the window. His mouth, his near-black eyes and the pink warmth splattered onto the curve of his cheek. He seems more at ease amidst the paper and the books, the ink, the warm wool, the cotton, the linen, but something more exhausted too.

It’s hard to swallow down, and hard to accept the way the easy affection wells up in his throat, softening Snafu all dangly-kneed and shaky. He wants to fall headfirst into Eugene’s bed to breathe him in, bathe in the ghost of his form, asleep. It would warm him from the outside in - he feels like the longer he’d stay in Eugene’s bed, the better a person he’d become - hot-glass burst of his heart.

“Dinner’s ready in about an hour.” says Eugene when he’s done with the stack of paper. He falls into his bed in a practiced movement. Snafu supposes that that’s what does it, too; Part of what made him so bitter and cold in comparison to Eugene was that dinner tended to be ready in an hour and that he could effortlessly fall into bed every time Snafu was busy trying to make ends meet.

“Why am I staying here? Hell, _ where _am I staying?”

Eugene flushes again and fixes him with those deer-eyes of his.  
“Uh.” then he pats the space next to him on his bed in lieu of an answer.

“I guess we could get a bed roll or something but the bed’s more comfortable. And it’s spacious, so-”

He doesn’t say it. _ We wouldn’t be touching _. Like admitting the concept itself is too… what exactly? Friendly?

“Don’t worry about it.”  
“-And well, the hut that you usually sleep in, it’s kinda flimsy. The storm could easily take it apart.”

Is he hurrying his words?

“It’s okay.” he says and drops onto the mattress. 

“Making myself comfortable as we speak.”  
“Good.”  
“_Good _.”

The windows rattle in a gust of wind, the trees outside are groaning under the force of it.

Snafu shifts his weight onto his side and finds that Eugene is already watching him. Their eyes meet and somewhere between his own set of eyes and Eugene’s there’s an electric current crackling, like a thin, shared thread of consciousness that spans from Snafu’s pupils to Eugene’s. Eugene, who’s lying on his side as well, head propped into his hand, Eugene who flicks his eyes over every part of his face as if he were trying to memorize it. The wind whistles through the cracks of the old Colonial style house. Snafu blinks. Thunder cracks. Eugene blinks.

How easy it would be, to lean forward, scooch a little closer - and with the smile that blossoms on Eugene’s face, the tender springtime-root of it manifesting in the dimples his mouth is set between, the slow pull of his lips as they spread thinner and bare a glimpse of his front teeth - Snafu thinks he might not even have to be the one to do it.

It’s absolute, senseless indulgence; Just for a moment he wants to let himself feel the possibility of it, of what it would be like if this could happen to someone like him. Have a boy smile at him like that, where it’s welcome, where it’s not part of a deal. He’s sleeping in, it feels like. Or sitting down a few minutes longer after his break has ended. He’s indulging in the mere idea of kissing Eugene with his mouth open and having him kiss back. He knows, rationally- He knows it won’t happen but he needs to act like it could, to keep going, so even to Snafu’s frown-trained mouth there’s the trace of a smile.

He doesn’t dare think about how much an hour of this, just this, would cleanse him. What bitter, desiccated little parts of him Eugene could reach with his smile. Singing heart in his chest.

“Hey.”

A soft, steady force pulling at him like the moon the tide. Hard not to risk it.

“Hey yourself.”

Eugene turns over onto his back, pensive, and the nervous anticipation washes off him. The springs creak and he crosses his arms behind his head so Snafu’s left to observe his profile. Seeing the low-light shape of his long, dimpled nose. He watches the curve of Eugene’s brow as it creases.

“Eddie’s engaged.”

It’s unexpected.

Snafu’s heard him talk about his brother a handful of times but their relationship appears distant. It might be for the age gap between them; Eugene ever the pampered nestling of the family.

“And…?”  
  
Eugene’s chest rises and deflates on a sigh and Snafu watches his side. He reminds Snafu of a weary dog that huffs as it lies down, like a precious pet.  
  
“Mother-” he starts “Well, she doesn’t want me in the house forever. She’s worried, I think.”

He presses his lips together.

“We fought.”

Snafu purses his lips, critical.  
“Like she wouldn’t be all down from her baby leaving the nest.”

Eugene turns back to face him, surprised.

“I mean-“ Snafu grasps at the air like there’s the words he needs in it as he reiterates.

“She’s always doting on you, think she’d get depressed if she hadn’t anybody to dote on.”

“Maybe you’re right.”

Of course he is. He’s been around enough times to see how she flurries around him like fall leaves in a gust of wind. Spiraling around him, making sure his every need is met without him having to do so little as open his mouth. Finds it kind of obnoxious, actually, with Eugene being a grown man and more than capable of taking care of himself but then again, maybe that’s just mothers. Maybe the whole issue stems from how he’s never had that.

“Think you wanna do something about it?”

“Like what?”

Snafu shrugs

"Like leave?"

\---

Dinner is uneventful but it’s tense. The kind of uneventful that’s waiting for someone to break the veneer and make it a psychodrama. Snafu keeps his mouth on a leash because he’s not used to people staring at each other all tight eyes, tight lips. The sound of silverware on ceramic are needle pricks in the silence. The passing of the salt is a statement, the polite, deliberate question and the polite, deliberate handling of it like it’s a grenade waiting to have the pin popped out. He thinks it’s ridiculous but there’s no one else he can be here other than the poor little bastard, grateful to be sitting at the same table as those rich white folks. In the context of this he’s almost surprised Eugene didn’t turn out more snobby.

In a way, he is grateful. Thinking back to that first night - he might have collapsed. He knew pain, could endure hardship and exhaustion like he was made with them in mind but he was sure he might have dropped stone-cold to the ground if he hadn’t found a bed there. He was hungry for days after that, like no amount of food could sate his hunger. That kind of hunger that has you chewing the inside of your cheek, the kind that has you almost crying in relief when you get your hands on something. 

One of the maids was sent over to bring him a stew of some sort, large, fatty chunks of meat and carrots and beets. Some of theirs, probably. Very much unlike the measured sirloin in front of him, and he remembers having to wait until she was gone because he knew that as soon as he’d bite his teeth in, he wouldn’t let go. He was still hungry after but not enough to have him sleepless over it. Hungry for a week after, after the sandwiches the next day at lunch where he’d had to measure himself there and then in front of the stranger version of Eugene he couldn’t let his hunger on in front of. He recalls apples, the magnetic pull of them from the other side of the fence. Remembers not really caring for a fight but knowing it would happen, doing it regardless. He was so prickly and tense with it, annoyed with how someone like Eugene held on to this kind of lawfulness only because he could afford it.

Really, it was about anything he could get into himself after sleeping out in the open for days, stealing scraps from strangers and walking on regardless. From the moment he’d started walking, the ghost of Guilford was always following too close to his back and he hardly ever stopped in an effort to outrun him, until he grew too tired. All of it over nothing.

—-

_"You can't keep doing this to me."_   
  
_Hank Guilford has the tendency to appear out of thin air like a ghost, and to appear at the worst possible times too. With the sudden presence he's met with, Snafu realizes the sway to his legs and the heat rising to his cheeks. But the statement demands more attention. Snafu tries:_

_"I'm not doing anything."_

_Crickets, the sounds of people in a bar all muddled together into a cacophony of music, of glass clinking, people cheering, something breaking._   
_The night is so hot that Snafu's shirt clings to him._

_"What is it that I'm doing?"_

_"Dunno." Guilford looks pained in a way that almost evokes pity. "But you're doing it."_

_"You can't even say!"_

_"Shut up!"_

_Something about him is different today. Looking at it through the dim light of the moon, Snafu can tell there's lines in his expression that aren't practiced. He looks younger than he usually does, and older too. Hands in his pockets, lowered head: submission. It contrasts with the rest of him._

_"Don't know how to say it, but I know you're doing it. You're disrespecting me."_

_"You're nuts."_

_Somewhere in the distance Bette Davis is murmuring in her sweet Transatlantic. The moon, the stars._

_"I want you to stay."_

\---

The white varnish of the window frames segments the thunderstorm clouds outside as Eugene and Snafu watch the storm unravel in the parlour. Despite it only being the two of them seated leisurely across from each other, there’s the presence of unwelcome spectators: the couple upstairs. The presence of Eugene’s mother whirring about in her long skirts, the presence of his father sitting lax on the tufted leather couch, smoking a pipe much like Eugene himself. The apple and the tree. Against the backdrop of pitch black, Snafu draws the line from the very top of Eugene’s hairline, down the curved forehead over the brow, the dip of his eyes then the long slope of his nose. Follows it like he’s tracing it down to the very tip of the nose, lower, lips, one, two, and the pointed chin. Eugene turns.

“If you could go anywhere, where would you go?”

Snafu shrugs, his eyes still fixed on Eugene’s face. “Far away.”

A burst of laughter wells forth from Eugene. Light and airy, like an enthusiastic welcome at a train stop.

“You don’t have anything to add to that?” He’s smiling when he says it. Amused, the way he says it.

“Well, what about you then if you’re so damn smart?”

No bite to it - Eugene thinks. He leans back on the sofa where he’s seated all the way unreachable, across the coffee table, across from Snafu. He’s meeting Snafu’s intent gaze the way he’d usually avoid it, raises his hands at the wordless provocation of how unfaltering it is.

“Alright, alright, let me think about it!”

For a split second the room is cast in a blinding white before the thunder groans. The rain is whipping the windows. The pipe that hangs from Eugene’s mouth puts a funny dent into his upper lip as the ember glows, unaffected. He’s pensive, frowning with his eyes but not with the rest of him, tapping light, nimble fingers on the armrest.

“I s’pose you’re right.”

The tobacco in the pipe flares, hisses. Snafu can taste the sticky sweet smell of it in the back of his throat and it makes him itch to taste it on Eugene.

“I think if I could go anywhere, I think I’d just… never stop. You know, never really settle anywhere, just keep moving and see where it takes me. Soon as you settle it catches up with you, I think. When you arrive. It might always be a couple steps behind you but if you halt you can’t outrun it.”

“Gene.”

Eugene looks up from the hand in his lap, dark eyes darting over the miles-wide expanse of the coffee table until they arrive where Snafu is already meeting his gaze.

“What have _ you _got to outrun?”

“Oh Snaf, don’t be a prick.”

Eugene’s full of surprises tonight and Snafu wants to eat it up, the dark intrigue behind all the manners.

“You asked me, one night, one of the first nights- you asked me if I see ‘em at night too.”

He pulls the pipe out from between his lips, flicks the lighter.

“And I do. I see everything that’s wrong with me and I see them, and I see those who should have survived in my place. That’s plenty to outrun if you ask me, even if I don’t seem tormented enough to you.”

“Never said that.”

“Yeah but you think it, don’t you?”

A beat of silence and he has his confirmation.

“I know that when you’re in the middle of it, it can seem like you’re the only one who’s hurt or affected or even just feeling at all but I’m here too, I see all this from my side, too.”

Shelton’s eyes are luminous and bright when he’s caught wordless and there’s that split-second without the veneer where his mouth is slack and Eugene can see right into him, knowing he was dead on the money. It doesn’t last long but he counts it as a win and when Shelton’s voice returns it cracks at the start, just so.

“I never said that.”

In his home, Shelton is an unfamiliar sight - he seems so out of place with his unruly hair, the untamed wiry locks, and his posture slack but carrying an uneasy tension. When they were upstairs, it was nothing like the 13 foot display case of this room, that they’re posing in like actors in a play. 

In the humble cave Eugene hollowed out for himself in this house he seemed to fit right in, like Eugene had subconsciously left that space unoccupied over all these years - just enough space to fit him. The chaise longue looks good around him but Eugene’s bed looked better and he wishes he could go back to that moment right now, just to think of kissing him again with his mouth open and his eyes closed.

“It’s just the war ain’t the only bad thing that happened to me.” says Shelton then and Eugene knows.

“It’s been bad for a long time before that. It’s not like here with the nice furniture and all that damn china you have in your cupboards.”

He looks so quietly afflicted that Eugene yearns to cradle his head to his shoulder, stroke his hand over the top of his head where his hair smells the sweetest.

“I know.” Eugene wishes he could hold him hard enough that the lines of their bodies blurred. “Wish I could’ve taken some of that off of you.”

Shelton sighs, aggravated and uneasy. Eugene can tell he’s not buying it and it hurts him in the same place that tells Eugene to hide him away from it all. Words never seem to arrive in Shelton the way Eugene sends them out.

“I’m just saying I wish there was a way to half the load.”

“Gene, just-” Shelton deflates. “Let’s just not.”

The weight of the day, the early morning, the long ride, the cold, hard pinpricks Eugene felt on the back of his neck when they were riding out in the rain all accumulates and bares its true weight in the slumped-over kind of exhaustion he sees in Shelton. He wishes he could reach over and smooth out the dark under his eyes, ease some of the pain. Eugene gets up with a finality before he packs up his pipe and haphazardly swipes his hand over the glass-top table. Shelton looks at him with curious interest but stays seated and the way his eyes follow Eugene around, jumpy, honest, sweet, makes him greedy and possessive in a way he’d never let himself feel before he’d crossed the fence. It revealed parts of his true self, the kind that lust after pressing his thumb into Shelton’s carotid hard enough to make him slack with it when he kisses him. The lick of desire that blazes in his chest when he thinks about grabbing him by the waist and hoisting him up and fills his lungs when he thinks of Shelton underneath him, breathless.

If Eugene had an inkling of common sense remain in his body he’d have found a way to make sure Shelton and he wouldn’t be sleeping in the same bed tonight, but the anxious prospect of his sleeping form next to himself, the vulnerable back turned to him, all curled in on himself, the guarded tension in his brow replaced by an open curve, the provocative, pointed mouth slack with his pillowy top lip softly jutting out, makes him stupid with want.

With a finality, he places an electric hand to Shelton’s shoulder that signals him it’s time and when Shelton quietly places his own on top of Eugene’s and turns to look, he’s lost. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> leave a keysmash!
> 
> oh and, thank you for being patient with me. Writing takes me time because not only am I a merciless perfectionist but also because amidst the stress of the past few months from breaking up with a friend to trying to find an apartment to starting a new job to moving into my new apartment it's really difficult to sit down and focus when your mind is anything but! i'm hoping to update more regularly also partially due to the fact i ended this... there.... and i feel like i can't leave the few people who DO read this and DO enjoy this hanging!


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _ “I know what you mean.”  
Eugene busies himself with a stick he finds lying on the ground just to have something to do with his hands.  
“It’s gotten better though, ever since-”  
He cuts himself off. Toeing that edge of revealing too much a little too close. Shelton seems to catch on but says nothing, eyes on the same fire as Eugene’s.  
“It’s gotten better.” _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> gears shifting... cogwheels turning...
> 
> (we got some of that very mild sexual content at the very end so yeah, beware! It's hard to tell what different people classify as T/M so I'm not changing the rating yet. Just like, read at your own discretion)
> 
> Oh yeah, also this is a direct continuation of the last chapter so if you have to catch up on that because i update like, every two months, i rec going over the last couple paragraphs.

In that quiet space around them, Eugene’s hand lingers like on its own accord, enveloped by Shelton’s warm palm. His shoulder is a soft curve and when Eugene brushes his thumb over the edge of it, the sharp protruding bone feels frail and hollow. By that magnetic pull, Eugene is stuck there.

Half of Shelton‘s expression is veiled by a hard shadow, a new kind of unreadable. Instead of his prickly and mean pout that’s the telltale sign of another well-timed jab there’s no tension to his brow. All that’s left for Eugene to gauge him is the hollow black of his pupils, the window to the wise, old, cosmic dark and they meet him, unfaltering and perfectly vulnerable.

When Eugene draws his hand away, he hears the ruffle of Shelton’s sleeve as it smooths out with the movement. Every rustle of it loud through the quiet room, over the backdrop of the rain pattering softly against the roof. When Eugene steps back, the floor board squeaks and sighs and the tap of his heel resounds in the deafening silence before the thunder rolls again and the arrhythmic drumming of the rain intensifies with a violent gust of wind. Shelton clears his throat.  
  


„Are you going to bed?“  
  


Eugene nods without saying anything and Shelton moves to get up, packing the few stray belongings he had scattered on the table.  
  


„I‘ll have to borrow something to sleep in.“  
  


The packet of cigarettes is stuffed into the back pocket of his jeans.

„Wouldn‘t wanna wake up to my bare ass in your face, eh?“

Eugene‘s laugh is curt and polite. Something nervous.

„Don‘t worry.“  
  


He‘s long let go of Shelton’s hand when they walk upstairs but it feels like there’s a version of him that hasn’t. He might as well still be holding onto it, with how close Shelton is following after. Something about the brief journey feels oddly final, moving past the family portraits on the eggshell wall, away from the illuminated entrance into a bluer, more pronounced darkness. Swallowed whole by it, like a cave.

Before he turns the knob he looks back over his shoulder like Orpheus, but Shelton doesn’t vanish, instead a dark silhouette with a lamplight halo embracing him from behind, solid and unerring as ever, face unreadable.  
The door clicks shut behind them.  
  
For the first time in his life, Eugene is so greedy he‘s almost sick with it. The room feels like a separated entity from the rest of the world, almost like nothing outside of it existed. With this it becomes impossible to ignore the weight of his presence behind him and his heart trembles in his core like a bird trying to escape its cage.  
  
The springs of his bed squeak as Shelton sits and the knowledge of it alone is enough to make his heart speed up, a rising metronome thrum in his chest.  
In an attempt to distract himself, Eugene sifts through his drawers and finds clothes for Shelton to wear, knowing he could easily breathe in the lingering scent of him in the morning, after Shelton’s sleep-warm body has changed into something else. It's as though everything that occurs to Eugene’s infatuated mind serves to spur on the fire. Eugene can’t remember ever not wanting like this, the need to swallow him up fitting into him like second nature, and it’s as scary as it is exhilarating. The path of each of his thoughts eventually dipping into that red-hot desire that consumes him.

He throws him the clothes and when they change, they’re back to back.

Eugene’s mind supplies him with the shape of Shelton’s naked form, the plane of his back that verges into his tight waist the lower he goes. His thighs, his bony knees, one of them probably drawn close to his chest as he’s stuffing his foot through the leg of the pants Eugene gave him. Knee to nipple, the bronzed curve of his shoulder to hide it behind, a rib cage that dips into shadow twelve times, skinny. A collarbone like a rain gutter, sharp, collecting sweat. He wishes he could look but much like Orpheus he can’t turn now or he’d risk losing it all, being that one too many in his little reveals over the past weeks that he’s known. He doesn’t know what would be scarier if he did look: Shelton, unaware or Shelton, horrified or Shelton, already expecting his gaze.

Dressed and clean-faced, they lie down next to each other in dead silence, expectantly staring up at the ceiling like there’s a movie about to start. Shelton huffs quietly, his chest a quick rise and slow fall as he lies, one foot tucked under his calf, leg bent at the knee. Eugene has his hands crossed over his sternum like a corpse, not daring to tilt his head sideways and allow himself a glance at Shelton’s pointed profile despite it being the only thing he wants to do. Or the first thing anyway - but he’s frozen still like he's playing dead.  


The room is dark around him and the rain soothes him just enough for the thunder to drown out. He‘s learned to deal with those little reminders of wartime by taking note of where he is in minute detail. The curtains are closed but the blinds aren’t. The mattress under him squeaks when he moves and the blanket on top of it touches the side of his feet, his heels, the back of his legs, his back, the back of his arms. Eugene takes mental inventory of the objects that clutter his table and focuses on how his hand feels as it slides down his chest to his belly to the side of his waist before it falls down into the space between Shelton and he, with a thud as quiet as his heartbeat.

He flexes his fingers, one by one. Index and middle straightening, curling into a loose position next to him. He hardly breathes, so aware of it and the noise it makes when he does. So nervous he bates his breath, scared to move at all. Shelton hasn’t made a tone since he closed that door behind him and that makes it harder too.

Slowly, like a turtle crawling over a sandy shore towards the ocean, Eugene stretches his elbow out. He focuses on the flex of his tendons and the rasp as he drives his hand over his pristine sheets. A wandering animal of some sort, searching for something or someone. It creeps closer to the middle, that invisible line between Shelton and he that’s at the dead center of the bed, sectioned in two by convention.  
  
There’s a line there that he’s trying to cross before his doubts can catch him. Then Shelton moves and it nearly startles him into withdrawing it - the springs creak and Shelton sighs again, breath trembling? He hears another little animal crawling towards the center of the bed from Shelton’s side, the same telltale rasp of the sheets as it smooths over them and after Eugene’s next blink his pinky finger touches onto foreign, warm skin and his stomach seems to bottom out, heart throbbing in his throat.

He turns his head to Shelton, already expecting his gaze and it’s too dark to make out anything other than the vague shape of it but he doesn’t need to see because Shelton‘s fingers are suddenly curled tight and warm around Eugene‘s.

Eugene can feel himself shaking, which makes him even more nervous. He squeezes Shelton’s hand and listens to his bated exhale, every sound he makes, close enough to feel them on his lips if he tried hard enough. But not close enough.

In a spur of bravery, Eugene inches a little bit closer to that invisible line, crumpling bed sheets all shifting blues and greys as he moves, and he can smell him, that’s how close he is. He can smell the soap on him and the scent of laundry and his hair and a light afterglow of sweat. He‘s close enough to hear him open his mouth and hear him exhale and he‘s close enough to feel that exhale on his lips. He has his eyes closed and he knows Shelton does too. Eyes closed, lips parted, breathing, alive. With his hair sticking out, untamed, with the full top lip, with the narrow, bony shoulder pulled up to the sweet curve of his cheek. His hand in Eugene’s, Eugene’s hand in his, inseparable, warm and hopeful. 

But in the end, Eugene doesn’t lean forward and neither does Shelton.

—-

When he wakes up, it’s the crackle of something loud as a grenade that moves Eugene into action. He startles into consciousness like second nature, ready to sprint, ready to grab at his shoulder like there’s a gun hefted over the side of it. It’s only after he’s patted down his entire cotton-clad, damp-with-sweat body in the search for something hard and metallic that he realizes where he is.  
He looks to his right and remembers Shelton and the storm that led to having him in his bed and watches him as he thrashes and winces, eyes shut, brows screwed into a frown but seemingly asleep.  
He thinks to wake him up but his hand freezes before he can touch it to his arm.  
  
Disoriented in that sleep-laced way he connects his feet to the hardwood-floor, then wanders over to the window to squint into the pitch-black distance. Before his eyes adjust, the only thing he can see is his reflection, squinting back at him but then there’s lightning and then he sees smoke emerge from the hut that Shelton normally sleeps in, the spot in the roof Shelton normally sleeps directly under.   
He’s transfixed as he watches the roof crumble with the whipping wind.

—-

There’s something disorienting about watching Shelton desperately rifle through his belongings in the grey, early morning. The floor of the room is soaked in rainwater as they arrive, the outermost, unvarnished layer of it softening and peeling apart. Eugene stands silently as he can’t seem to say a squeak and only came along for a sense of obligation. Meanwhile, Shelton’s movements are frantic, pulling the soaked duffel bag out from under his bed and emptying it face down. The rain has mostly subsided now, only scarce droplets from those wispy clouds that linger in an otherwise warm day and despite that, the air feels heavy and foreign with that petrichor smell.

At the end of it, Shelton holds a tight fist around something he found, and won’t let Eugene see what it is.

—-

The sun the next noon comes as clear and unrelenting that it seems like it’s practicing vengeance for being shunned from the sky the night before. The rain evaporates and clings to every surface it can find; the droplets of dew that had laced the cool morning grass are now humid air to crawl up Eugene’s skin under the white tee he’s wearing when the two of them are trying to fix the damage caused by the storm. It’s so humid that he can hardly tell if he’s sweating, or rather feels like he's sweating inappropriately, as he climbs about the storm-damaged roof of what used to be Shelton’s bedroom. The gutters of it, close to the long, greyed walls, are full of debris and splintered shingles and he makes an effort to sweep at them to make way for the overflowing water.  
  
By his side, a few feet above him, to his left, Shelton is humming a quiet song that sounds like an unfamiliar nursery rhyme. Since the night he’s hardly spoken and closed down into himself even further after he’d closed his fist around that something he found in the ruined room. Despite that, he’s humming and playing and Eugene is once again left to err in the dark when it comes to reading his moods.

When lunch rolls around they sit knee to knee, idly watching the house. Eugene bites into his sandwich just as he realizes that he can see his bedroom from here - unsurprising but an unfamiliar perspective - and considers that night before, where he’d held Shelton’s hand in his.

In the sober light of day, he understands it less than he did mere hours ago.  
What was once a certainty that this small intimacy was the start of something much bigger than the sum of their parts has dissipated and trickled down into questions and doubts, each one more pressing than the next. It could have been a fluke. That maybe Shelton was already asleep when it happened and had only held on out of instinct, much like babies will firmly grab their hands around any finger that presents itself to them. Maybe it was all dreamed up by Eugene himself but then again, it was much too vivid for that. Maybe it was a platonic acknowledgement of the other’s presence.

As all these problems present themselves to him, each with its own disquieting urgency, he hears the last bit of a sentence.

“-sometime.”

Eugene turns, inquiring.

“I said,” Shelton starts again. “It’s getting colder soon. That we should go camping before the fall.”

“That’s…” Eugene frowns, sliding his glance back over to the rectangle window of his room.

“I find it surprising you’d be interested in something like that.”

Shelton shrugs.

“Just thought it’d be nice.”

When Eugene turns to look at Shelton once again, he’s deliberately turned the other way. It’s not because Eugene’s mustering him too obviously, Eugene knows that, but that he catches himself red-handed at trying to decode his motive without realizing it’s what he set out to do.

“There ain’t much to it. I just wanna unwind for a bit.”

Eugene nods before he realizes that Shelton can’t see him. Something about Shelton in this mood brings out the drive to fix things, although Eugene couldn’t pinpoint the thing that needs fixing. He watches him watch; Shelton’s head turned away, the line of his eyes cast out onto the long, broad plains of wheat stretching out as far as the eye can see. It’s mystifying how spellbound Eugene is because anytime Shelton shows a little bit of himself, Eugene will latch onto it near parasitic.

He can’t stop thinking about how Shelton‘s hand felt in his. Firm and warm, worked but surprisingly tender.

“Should we drive?” He asks, all three words coming out near simultaneously and regrets asking when he hears a burst of a laugh although Shelton still won’t turn.

The thing about his logic is that he believes it should be as painstakingly obvious to others as it is himself. And the fact that out of an overwhelming desire to please him, Eugene didn’t see the very clear image of the trip Shelton had envisioned and asked this, has Shelton smug. He huffs.

“ _ Yeah _ .”

Once the plan is solidified, Eugene wants to check his watch every five minutes. Shelton still sleeps in his bed for the next few days but unlike that first night, he won’t turn. Left with the ever-present, looming shape of his back that’s turned to him wall-like, Eugene blinks through the darkness until his eyes are dry. He’ll watch the rise and fall of his form with every breath and because Shelton usually falls asleep before he does, it takes up a solid portion of his days to worry and to introspect.

For three consecutive days he lays awake for as many hours doing nothing but mull over his inaction until he’s angry with himself.  
He’s always considered himself fairly straightforward, reflected but not overly cautious, but that’s changed since Shelton. Despite his desire to make up a plan or a direction he comes up empty every time, so trapped in that limbo he goes crazy with indecisiveness. To talk or not to talk. To touch or not to touch.

What he’s learned is that this kind of indecisiveness takes the choice away from him, like being swept off his feet and bounced around by fate because he's too in his head to make a move to counter that. And while he thinks on it,  Shelton, even in his sleep, still won’t turn to face him.  
  


The days trickle by, slowly like spoiled milk and by Thursday, Eugene is so exhausted with the nervous anticipation that he almost doesn’t want to go on the trip anymore. The faceless worry manifests itself in his churning, twisted stomach so he can’t help but feel uncomfortable, every waking hour, like he’s grown too tall for his skin. 

Shelton, it seems, grows more beautiful and radiant by each passing minute and having him around day and night is almost too much if it didn’t feel so damn good. One evening Eugene comes upstairs from the bathroom and finds Shelton sitting in the middle of the bed, turning and grinning at him in that way he does when Eugene enters the room, wearing Eugene’s grandfather‘s old hat - a worn, black cattleman. He wants to stumble over the bed and kiss him smack-dab on the lips because he looks every bit the mischievous little thing he is from under the brim, eyes glinting mischievously, shining back at Eugene through the shadow in that glossy blue. The way he smiles would have the devil himself hanging onto his every word and Eugene falls harder by the minute.

On Friday, the sun peeks right over the horizon when Eugene test-starts the car and Shelton drags his feet over the gravel driveway under the translucent morning sky. They crunch under the soles of his shoes and under the rubbery tires and Eugene stifles a yawn into the crook of his elbow as he listens to the lull of the radio crackling through the open driver’s door. Shelton throws the lid shut behind the tent and sleeping bags and he quietly resumes to the passenger seat, heavy-lidded with bruise-like shadows under his eyes. He‘s wearing the hat again.

He’s taken a shine to it and Eugene lets him, because if there's one person he can’t say no to... He has the rousing suspicion that Shelton knows it.

They drive for a long time and then some. Sometimes it’s Eugene behind the steering wheel and then they switch. Shelton changes the station after every second song, Eugene prefers talk radio. The road is so straight one can almost see the curvature of the earth and eventually, mountains come into view that are so large and beautiful that they look unreal, like he’s dreamed them up. The blue sky shimmers behind them and the air around the mountaintops has a watery quality to it. Eugene can almost taste it dissolving on his tongue, like ice from a glacier. As they near the mountain road, the cement gives way to gravel and the truck stutters as it proceeds upon it. Lined with pines on both sides, with flickering shadow and light cast onto the car and the pair of them, the road curves in tight loops like an uneven coil before they reach the spot Eugene set out for, a serene little clearing with a lively, crystal-clear stream.

As soon as he gets out of the car, Shelton stretches hard enough for his joints to pop while Eugene busies himself with unpacking. He peeks over the back of the truck to see Shelton turned toward the water.

“This is _it_!“ he says, satisfied, extending his arms in a dramatic gesture. “It’s perfect.”

“My dad used to take my brother and I when we were little. It’s always been our spot.”

“Guess it’s my spot now, too.” Shelton grins.

“Well," Eugene drops the tarp and tent poles to the ground with a thump "Work for it.”  
Shelton comes over with a happy spring to his step.

“Where d’you wanna set it up?”

After a few minutes of scouting the ground for an even spot, Eugene goes to work at building the tent. Shelton’s resolved to search for dry twigs and small pieces of wood to burn in a fire and hurries about the perimeter excitedly while Eugene tries to get the long metal stakes into the ground.

It’s not too long before Eugene is sitting by the stream, toeing off his shoes and putting his feet in the freezing water. He preps a lure while he hears Shelton rummaging a dozen feet behind him, stray curses and the clack of wood on wood. Eventually he hears the hiss of a match and a hum of approval before the footsteps approach him. Shelton sits down beside him, a full-body slump.

„Any luck?“ Shelton asks, lighting a cigarette before passing it on to Eugene, who gratefully accepts.

„Not yet. You?“

„Made it work.“

The cigarette travels back to Shelton who sticks it in the side of his mouth as he goes to work on the other fishing rod, nimbly tying a lure and sticking a worm on the sharp hook. He watches it squirm for a moment.

„Pity you didn’t catch anything yet. You can use the eyes for bait, you know.“

Eugene pulls a face. „Gross.“

„Sure, but it works wonders.“ Then: „Hey, gimme that.“

Shelton reaches over Eugene’s lap who‘s holding a flask in his left hand, mockingly pulling it further away from him. He pins the rod between his knees when Shelton all but climbs over him to snatch at the stretched-out arm and Eugene laughs before he surrenders it to him.

„Don‘t hog it!“ Eugene warns and Shelton huffs at him.

„Says you, who‘s been bumming all my smokes.“

The laughter tethers out into silence and then night eventually settles around them, a warm glow coming from the campfire Shelton checks up on, every so often.  
As soon as Eugene does as Shelton told him and starts using the eyes of the fish he‘s caught for bait, it feels like he‘s suddenly tapping into an endless supply of them. One after the other lands in the bucket and by the time they‘re roasting them over the crackling, open flame, Eugene’s belly is twisting and turning with hunger and anticipation.

Hungry as they both are, they‘re devoured not soon after; Nothing like fresh air and open fire to work up an appetite. Shelton is poking at the embers with a stick he‘s found in the undergrowth and Eugene watches the sparks turn in the wind, mesmerized. They hand a flask back and forth and it warms him from the inside out, the red glow on his face from watching the fire, the glow within from the whiskey, the sharp, burning sting of it in his throat. He’s so sated he thinks he’s never felt more content. Filled to the brim with cotton.   
  


„With what was going on last time I slept out in the open you‘d think I‘d never wanna do it again but I really missed it.“ Eugene then says, mouth around the flask before drinking from it.

Shelton looks up, still prodding at the fire with that papery, crunchy sound.

„It’s only good when you’re not getting shot at.“

„Yeah but…“ Eugene stretches his arms out in front of him. „It also doesn’t remind me of getting shot at, you know? Just feels like camping.“

„You don’t know what’s hiding out in them bushes.“

„I‘m serious!“

Shelton hums. Silence. He accepts the flask Eugene hands back to him.

„Yeah, no, I get it. It’s good like this.“

The chirping of bugs in the night, the happy trickle of the stream nearby.

„Don’t you think it’s weird how it sometimes happens that you feel scared for no reason, out of nowhere, and then other times when it‘d make sense to be scared, you’re not?“   
  


Eugene tilts his head questioningly, eyes on the fireplace.   
„What do you mean?“

  
„Like when we rode through that storm a couple days ago, it sounded like it, the sky looked like it but I wasn’t scared or anything. That was just a storm. But then sometimes when it’s dark out I‘ll startle from the shape of a tree. I‘ll grab at my shoulder like a gun‘s s‘posed to be there.“

  
Like a gun’s supposed to be there. That’s something Eugene understands.   
  
“I know what you mean.”   
Eugene busies himself with a stick he finds lying on the ground just to have something to do with his hands.   
“It’s gotten better though, ever since-”   
He cuts himself off. Toeing that edge of revealing too much a little too close. Shelton seems to catch on but says nothing, eyes on the same fire as Eugene’s.   
“It’s gotten better.”   
  


“Do you wanna go to sleep?” Shelton interrupts before Eugene can get any more of it out. He seems electrified, seems nothing like he could sleep right now. Eugene is tired but with everything around him, with that strange tension he’s feeling he doesn’t know he can.   
“Already?”   
  
Shelton looks at him, face illuminated from below, from the side, his cheek painted orange, flushed red. Darting all over Eugene, his eyes are unreadable and carrying a strange, dark weight. The groves of them are heavy.   
  
“Yeah.” He’s quiet. “I wanna go to sleep.”   
  
Eugene is confused but agrees to it. He turns the pots upside down, fastens the straps on their packs while Shelton crawls into the tent, illuminated only by weak, dim lamplight. After some adjusting and readjusting, Eugene is ready to follow him inside and it’s a tight fit, limbs all lanky, bumping into each other awkwardly. He thinks it’s the closest he’s been to someone since the war and the thought makes his blood rush. For that person to be Shelton…   
  
With everything Eugene’s laid out on the bottom of the tent, it’s quite comfortable. He pulls the edge of his blanket to the side, slips under it while Shelton is changing. Eugene allows himself to look at him briefly and is transfixed by the two moles on his rib cage, placed there in perfect vertical succession. Shelton’s scent fills Eugene’s nose, then his heart. It goes directly into his bloodstream, pumping, pumping, before his stomach gives out and he hides deeper in his blankets. He smells like salt and sweat and like the campfire he set up, he smells like the smoke and the whiskey, he smells like something Eugene wants to follow his nose to, find the source of, roll around in. He doesn’t know if he can stay without doing something very stupid.   
  


Shelton switches off the light before Eugene can protest and for a second he wonders if maybe he’s said something to upset him because he’s so quiet and forceful at once but then,

“Eugene.”, Shelton croaks through the darkness, soft, not at all angry. Tender.   
  
“Merriell.”   
It’s new. With no precedent, Eugene drops that given name before even knowing he’s said it out loud. He almost goes to correct himself but Shelton,  _ Merriell  _ sighs and it borders on dreamy - the kind of sound Eugene wants to pull from him, realizes now he wants to pull from him.   
  
“Eugene.” He says again, a lilt, an emphasis at the end. Desperate? He sounds like he can’t believe he’s saying it. He sounds like Eugene’s name is keeping him afloat.   
“Eugene, Eugene,  _ Eugene _ .”  
  
With each repetition of it, he rolls closer until he’s front to front with him, curled into Eugene’s chest. Eugene almost chokes with how tightly it grips at his heart.   
He’s so stupid, he barely knows what to do. That is, until he’s doing without thinking. He extends his arm and places his hand on Merriell’s bicep, right where his arm is bent at his elbow, feeling the forearm too. He has no sight to go on. His thumb starts moving on its own accord, brushing the rough pad of it over the thin skin of Merriell’s upper arm. Eugene goes on like he’s coaxing him until he’s even closer, even closer, balled up with the crown of his head right under Eugene’s nose. His hair smells so much like what he’s been chasing that he leans forward and inhales. All the way in. Twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three. All the way out. Twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three. 

Eugene sighs; he’s so in love and so turned on it’s almost painful to keep feeding it, the only issue is that Merriell doesn’t let him  _ stop  _ feeding it.    
  
He’s too much that nimble, bronzed creature that showed up at Eugene’s doorstep two months ago, too perfectly pliant and soft against all odds - it’s the contrast he’s been attracted to the most, Eugene thinks. Nothing about him is sweet when he observes the outside of him, it’s all jagged and rough and  _ mean  _ and he knows Merriell’s tried so hard to keep him at an arm’s length but then it all peels away for a glimpse, for the glimpse at the pond, the glimpse that night he came back all beat-up, the glimpse a few nights ago where he held his hand and that arm’s length comes down to nothing but the breadth of a hair. And then, what are they left with if even that dissipates? What would happen then, if there’s no more distance to close? What would happen then? What would-   
  
Eugene’s face is caught between two hands. Something heavy is coiling in him right where his soul sits. He knows what’s going to happen, that  _ it _ ’s going to happen and his heart is flying in his chest and despite the sticky, tar-black darkness around them, Eugene closes his eyes against it and hears a soft little sigh resound through the tent. Merriell is close enough that Eugene can feel his breath on his lips. He opens his mouth on instinct and then, he’s not sure when it starts but then he’s kissing him and Merriell is kissing him back. And  _ then  _ he has his hand under his shirt and Merriell sighs so absently that Eugene’s chest constricts all the way up to his throat with affection. He tastes like everything Eugene has ever dreamed up and more. He feels better than anything he could have imagined, the wiry little body of him bundled up against Eugene’s, the skin so warm under his wandering fingertips. Eugene sucks at that dreamy, object-of-his-affections top lip and Merriell moans and something inside him switches, something he knows he won’t come back from.

Eugene turns him on his back and slides on top, and goes to work Merriell’s lips until they’re plump and swollen, licking into his mouth until it’s all open and surrendered and Eugene can work him over like he’s wanted to for weeks. The desperate hunger that’s accumulated from the moment ever since he’s known to now emboldens Eugene, making him forward to the point he’s worried is too much. But Merriell loves it, seems to love it, gripping onto every inch of him he can find, nails buried in his shoulder, gripping at his sides, his waist, his back. He moans, high and sweet and on God, if Eugene isn’t charmed by the unabashed way he does it. Merriell isn’t afraid of showing Eugene he’s burning up with it, not like Eugene was mere hours ago. Hence the camping, Eugene thinks. Was that the ulterior motive?

Eugene reaches over Merriell’s shoulder to turn on the light and stops kissing him to look down at him sternly.

„Camping?“ Eugene asks and the image hits him before he can add his  _ Really _ ? Merriell looks every bit a Renaissance painting, debauched and near-suffering, glassy-eyed, and flushed and gold all over. His mouth hangs open and he’s heaving under him, chest rising-falling, curls in his face, haloed on his pillow. Eugene watches his grin spread on his pretty face in slow-motion, that characteristic tar-slow thing.

„You wanna go home? You don’t like it?“

Eugene drops his head where Merriell’s neck meets his shoulder and groans against his skin. Hears the laugh spill over his head.

„Hate it.“ Eugene says with that frustrated edge. He can feel each shift of Merriell’s wiry body under him and grabs onto his hip to press him down.

„Kiss me.“ croaks Merriell, hot from the tips of his toes to the top of his head. Eugene sucks into the spot on his neck he’s nestled against to a quiet little whine before he detaches and takes a moment to merely observe, to memorize his face well enough to see an imprint of him burned into his eyelids when he closes them.

When Eugene doesn’t go to kiss him, Merriell leans up, briefly connecting their lips before he falls back against the pillow, smiling in that way of his. Eugene can’t help but stare, so full of him in every way, head with thoughts about him, nose with the scent of him, hands with his body. Merriell goes again, then again until Eugene is over his indulgence and leans down to have at him, coaxing him open and wanting and when Merriell lets his legs fall apart and goes to wrap one around Eugene, he feels him hard against his thigh. 

Experimentally and purely on instinct, Eugene rolls his hips into him and gone is the smug expression, gone is that brazen grin. Merriell’s face is wiped blank before his brows knot into a frown and he gasps, hand clutching at Eugene’s shoulder and meeting him in the middle. He does it again, then again, then again. By the time Eugene realizes what he’s chasing, he’s rutting against Merriell like he knows nothing outside of it, spurred on by each little noise he makes. He's completely lost to the feel of his body, to making that body feel his own, and he could go on like this forever, have him under him forever-  
  
But then something stops him, Eugene is rolling off of him and sitting up like he's been woken from a trance.  
Merriell’s protest shows itself with a low, disgruntled whine and he frowns at the upright shape of Eugene, equal parts disappointed and concerned.

„What’s wrong? That was good.“  
  
Hearing him say that almost has Eugene abandoning his motivation to pause and get back to it, grinding, grinding until he comes hot and shameful in his pants but there’s something that doesn’t allow him.

„Not like this.“ says Eugene and when the question on Merriell’s face doesn’t ease, he tries to explain.

„It’s not all that I-„ he starts, hunched over and gripping at his knees. „It feels too soon like this, like it‘ll all sizzle out after.“

Merriell sighs, sitting up and mirroring Eugene’s posture. After a moment of quiet, he touches his fingers to Eugene’s wrist and nods, soothingly circling his knuckles.  
„That’s okay.“ he sighs and it’s apparent that he’s overcoming some disappointment, biting down on that frustrated tinge to his voice.

„Thing is, I know you’re right but  _ shit _ if that didn’t feel good.“

„Yeah it did.“ Eugene agrees, head still all the way up in the clouds. Thinking on how Merriell moaned when he ground his hips against him, how he wants to do it again and again and  _ again _ .

He’s all strung-out with hormones, every inch of him wanting to do something about that attraction to Merriell he can feel stirring the very essence of him.

„It’ll stay good, though, right?“ Eugene asks.

Merriell thinks on that, then nods.

„I’m not going anywhere.  _ It’s _ not going anywhere.“  


"Neither am I."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> if you wanna make my day, leave me a line you liked!
> 
> (also oof y'all thanks for reading this damn thing keeps haunting me and i'm slow af but i do update, i DO but yeah still, thanks for sticking it out with me y'all are braver than any marine heh heh)
> 
> also tbf it’s still cut off but i couldn’t wait any longer and it’s fic it’s literally just fic


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